bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Missioinaries for Russia
Authors: Mara
Published: July 2007

In January Russia is decked out like a bride, snow covering the merciless scars of war, and glistening in the reflection of the sun . . . For the countryside is as beautiful as ever, untouched by politics and strife ... It is easy to wander back with the mind's eye and see the Russia of Tolstoy, the land so noted for its generosity in the sight of God, that it was called “Holy Russia”.

Let us recall that Russia, so as to get a clearer picture of the Russia of today.

It was an Agricultural land, where most of the education still clung to the religious houses, and the rest of the countryside were simple, trusting folk, who loved to see foreigners because they were different and therefore interesting. They were exceedingly hospitable, as all people are in lands where the climate is rigorous: if you do not put up the stranger for the night, and the next village is many a verst away, then he could easily perish, if not from the cold, then from the wolves on the way, which have aiways been numerous in Russia. As children we used to wonder whv our Lady did not come to a Russian Bethlehem, for there was always room for everybody, she would not have been homeless.
The Age Before Print
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

It is dangerous to disagree with so learned a man as Dr. Chaytor, but I cannot pretend that his recent interesting and scholarly work on medieval literature does not put one in a quarrelsome mood. A number of the views contained in it are highly disputable, and I feel that much of the rest of it is misleading, even if it cannot be definitely contradicted. The issues it raises, however, are tricky and delicate; nor are Dr. Chaytor’s own positions always perfectly clear. Still, there is so much in his book that seems quite definitely misleading that a reviewer can hardly avoid hostilities, even while he acknowledges that. Dr. Chaytor’s learning has once again made English students of- the Middle Ages his debtors.

Dr. Chaytor’s purpose is to examine and characterise medieval literature from the point of view, in particular, of the way in which it reached its public; and it reached it either orally or through script, but not through print. It is in this sense that he speaks of the “importance of the difference between the literary and critical methods of the early middle ages and those of modern times”, between the age of script and the age of print. We are to be shown how to understand medieval writings in the light of the fact that they were not printed.
Alcide De Gasperi, Prime Minister
Authors: Sturzo Luigi
Published: July 2007

The nomination of the Christian-Democrat, Alcide De Gasperi, as Prime Minister of Italy, marks the breaking of the Liberal and anti-clerical tradition of Italian politics. It is true that the first to be “President of the Council of Ministers’’ (the historic Italian title), in March, 1848, was Cesare Balbo, a Catholic belonging to the Neo-Guelf current, but after him came a series of Presidents, Catholic indeed, but known as Liberals because they stood for the abolition of the rights and privileges of the Church. The true founder of Italian Liberalism—of a conservative type both politically and economically—was Camillo Benso di Cavour.

Once relations between State and Church were broken, and Catholics constrained to follow the system of political abstention (the non expedit), no more opportunities came for the nomination of a Presilent openly professing himself a Catholic, outside the Democratic-Liberal Italian tralition, till the advent of the Popular Party (1919).

The first case presented itself in April, 1920, when the Popular Party had provoked the crisis of the Nitti Cabinet, but then the King chose Nitti himself to form a new ministry. However, through an imprudent move (his decree on the price of corn on the eve of the reopening of the Chamber), Nitti was obliged to present himself to the Chamber as resigning, with all his Ministry. This time the King called upon Giolitti, indicated by agreement of the Right and Centre (including many members of the Popular Party), and Giolitti once more came to the top.
Shadow Language
Authors: Haynes Renee
Published: July 2007

It would be interesting to trace to its origin that hidden language which is familiar to every adult male, and to a large proportion of women, but which is hardly ever written down, except on walls: and to know whether it arose because it is natural to man to use a special set of terms to indicate strange forces more powerful than himself; whether it is a consequence of the psychological disintegration of the Fall, which made human beings afraid of God and ashamed of their bodies; how it has been affected by the immense change in Western human ecology which began about 1750 and is still in progress; why it has flowed more deeply underground at one time than at another; and what significance lies in the fact that its terms, and the knowledge of its existence, have during the last fifty years come far nearer the surface of communal life.

An immense learning would be necessary fully to discuss all these points; and many of their implications have to be left aside by a writer without experience of the organic cultures of the East or of the mechanized economy of the U.S.S.R. It should be possible without this, however, very briefly to sketch the nature, function, and recent history of submerged language, at any rate in this country; and to suggest possible reasons for its slow invasion of ordinary speech.

The language deals mainly with three subjects: with God; with sexual life; and with digestion. God, mystery beyond all thought, all argument, all imagination, “to whom all angels cry aloud’’ and Whom all non-reasoning things worship by being alive; sexual life, through which humans consciously, as other creatures unknowingly, share in the almost incredible Divine activity of creating new selves, each sentient and unique, where before there was nothing; digestion, the unconscious process of transmuting into human bodies pieces of the outside world upon which their continued life depends.
Difficult Children A War‐Time Experiment
Authors: Wills W. David
Published: July 2007

Among the more valuable by-products of the recent war was the work which was done in the residential treatment of difficult children. Unostentatiously and quietly carried on, knowledge of this work, as a whole, might never have reached the general public if the Ministry of Health had not published, a year or so ago, a most interesting and informative pamphlet about it. It is with one small piece of this work—Barns Hostel School—that this paper is concerned.

A passing reference to Barns, in a recent Brackfriars, suggested that the school was started by the Q Camps Committee, which had been responsible for Hawkspur Camp. This is an excusable error, but may perhaps take this opportunity to make it clear that the Q Camps Committee is entirely unconnected with Barns House, and has no connection with the Society of Friends; the Q does not stand for Quaker.

The work at Barns Hostel School, however, was initiated by the Society of Friends, and attempted to express Friends’ principles. As Friends have never committed themselves to a credal statement it is not easy to say, shortly and clearly, what those principles are; but at any rate they are likely to be in the nature of corollaries to the one belief that has been described as the foundation stone upon which Quakerism is built. This is the belief in the “Inner Light”—in “That of God in every man”. The authoritative Quaker history claims that all the distinguishing views of Friends flow from this main proposition. It is not possible in this short paper to trace the connection between the various aspects of the work at Barns House on the one hand, and this fundamental proposition and its corollaries on the other.
Missiology
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

According to Father Rommerskirchen (Guide des Missions Catholiques 1937, p. 165) we owe the word ‘missiology’ to the French—the term ‘missiologie’ having been popularised by P&re Charles, S.J. German Catholics, under the inspiration of Professor Schmidlin, have preferred to use the word ‘Missionswissenschaft’ and it is perhaps unfortunate that English speaking Catholics did not follow their example and talk of the study or science of missions, rather than the clumsy and pretentious ‘missiology’.

Granted, however, that the term is in common use, the purpose of this essay is to attempt to explain its meaning. The explanation is really quite simple. Missiology is the scientific investigation and description of the history and conditions of the apostolic action of the Church in pagan countries. It is that part of Dogmatic Theology which provides us with a justification for what are termed Foreign Missions, and which discusses the ‘mode’ of missionary activity in relation to the data provided by the anthropologist, the historian of culture and other allied specialists. In so far as it is a self-conscious discipline Missiology is recent, but in principle, in its dogmatic foundations, it is part of the theological heritage of the Church. .

The Fathers and the great Scholastics dealt with its fundamental presuppositions as parts of the treatises on Providence and Faith. The discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, in that they revealed vast groups of persons ignorant of the Gospel, led to an extension of these treatises in relation to the problem of the salvation of the infidel. Lastly, in our own day the growth of the sciences of Anthropology and relevant discoveries in the fields of Comparative Religion and Psychology, have led to the accumulation of a vast mass of data which demands theological interpretation and application in practice. It is against this background that the pioneers, too numerous to mention, of Missiology have developed their discipline.
Mobility and Property
Authors: Synnot Finbar
Published: July 2007

The idea of this article was suggested by an anthropological lecture on two aboriginal peoples of the Pacific.

Two peoples, the Andamanese Islanders and the Tikopia, have lived within boating distance of each other for countless generations. The one is semi-nomadic, hunting and fishing. The other is, or was, agricultural. In the first the communal element in the ownership of property is very marked. In the second the private or personal ownership was far more marked.

From this arises a thought. Is it possible that the question of the balance of individual with communal or social rights in the ownership and use of property is not a matter of industrialism, nor of atheism, but chiefly of mobility or immobility of social occupation?

One can follow the idea in many fields: for instance in the Catholic Middle Ages. As the peoples of Europe began to settle, but were yet uncertain and largely mobile and pastoral, they developed the system called feudalism. Feudalism was a kind of socialism, in the sense that the prince, the owner and the employer all three coincided in the person of the feudal lord. All lands were held in trust from him. He was the government. He was the employer in so far as there was an employer outside the subsistence economy of the people who held tenures on his land.

As the people became more and more settled, agricultural, less and and less mobile, in the later Middle Ages and Reformation period, absolute individual tenure of land outside any further responsibility to an overlord became more and more common. The squirearchies appeared, and more and more independent farmers.
Gradation, Evolution and Reincarnation
Authors: Coomaraswamy Ananda K.
Published: July 2007

The following essay by Dr Coomaraswamy is offered to Black- friars readers for the very high degree of interest which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar standpoint to the familiar problem of the relation of science to religion.

The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the imagination of East and West lends support to the concept of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself which is called modem philosophy, has tended to imagine reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act, personal or impersonal as the point of view changes.

For St Thomas also, being is an ‘act’ to which, ultimately, even substance among the categories is potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other position available to the West can fruitful contact be made with the tradition Dr Coomaraswamy represents.

From a deepened understanding of the principles of St Thomas’s metaphysics, it may be possible, now that Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern tradition further than the position outlined in the De Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of consciousness of which Dr Coomaraswamy speaks, has nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental conceptions of theological modernism.
Material Foresight & Wastefulness
Authors: Riviere Isabelle
Published: July 2007

“How can prudent foresight be wastefulness? It doesn’t do to talk absurdities!”

It all becomes clear and easy if we once understand that God knows what he is saying ! With what simplification should we not be enriched if we would be persuaded that not one of his words is useless, not one of his commandments thrown at hazard and without a profound reason, that their end, since he loves us, is none other than our greatest good, our surest happiness. And then, that he is always right.

It is not sufficient, in order to put h'm in the wrong, that we should understand the necessity of what he ordains. It may be we lack some of the elements that would enable us to judge. God sees continually, and in the light of eternity, the totality of creation. As for ourselves, have we taken into consideration that our hand held before our eyes suffices to hide from them the narrow section that they embrace of our limited, terrestrial and changing horizon? How then should it not be that the greater part of God’s motives escape us? . . . Before judging God, let us first follow his teaching a little while to discover where it leads.

Let us see what trouble God takes to prove to us, by daily, unfailing experience, that foresight such as we understand it, is a bad speculation, whatever we may think of it.

The Hebrews would not listen to him, and believed themselves well advised to make a provision of manna for the following day, but it began to be full of worms, and it putrified.
The Place of the Crofter
Authors: Moncrieff George Scott
Published: July 2007

The romantic gloss that adheres to the crofter, his homestead and way of life, has given ample target for the shafts of the critics. They point out, with some justice, the poverty and hardship frequently entailed and the ambition of many crofters to send their sons to the cities. With less justice, probably none, they claim greater efficiency for larger units of cultivation. These critics are essentially children of the Industrial Age, as ever overlooking the more acute destitution that no reform has as yet eradicated from the way of life begotten of their own concepts. They have ever a notion that urban hardship can be eliminated with just a few more rules, regulations and by-laws. Unconsciously, they pay the crofter tribute in recognising that his life is not so easily directed.

We can hardly assess the value of the crofter to a civilised community without considering certain fundamentals. The root of the problem lies at the very quick of the question: is man an individual servant of God, or a servant of society? I do not think this is an over-simplification of the issue. Throughout the world today that same issue is being disputed. Everywhere, peasant societies are the backbone of resistance to authoritarianism and the subjection of man to society as vested in the State.
Father Hugh Pope
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

We are gathered to do reverence to the memory of a great priest, a great apostle, a great Dominican. We are gathered to offer the Holy Sacrifice to God to the end that he may speedily receive into his eternal peace the soul of one who was for all who knew him an inspiration and an example, a veritable man of God, one who was for so many of us a loving father, a patient teacher, a wise counsellor and an understanding friend. It is written in Holy Scripture: Praise not a man before his death, for a man is known by his children. Those of us who knew Father Hugh Pope best have not been able to refrain from praising him even while he yet lived; but now there can be no withholding that praise on the part of any; for he is indeed known by his children, known by the offspring of his apostolic mind, known by the many souls he brought to God, known by the brethren of his Order whom he nurtured by his paternal care and affection.

In his recent allocution to the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers the Holy Father fastened upon the very pillars of true Dominican life when he reminded all Dominicans that, in the words of their Constitutions, they must be ‘resolute in peace, assiduous in study and fervent in preaching’ if they would prove themselves worthy of their honoured name and high calling. When we look back over the long course of Father Hugh's life in the Dominican Order we realise that he set himself from the outset to attain an ideal which he pursued unwaveringly to the very end.
Towards A Catholic Criticism
Authors: Cleeves Janet
Published: July 2007

Criticism begins in an act of reason. Beason separates individual qualities from a previously undifferentiated whole. Judgment then steps in to appraise the result. Criticism in art results from the detachment of the spectator from the artist and from his work. It works in two ways. It gives awareness of the qualities in the object surveyed. It also reveals to the critic his own attitude towards it. Criticism is, therefore, an advance from the unquestioning acceptance or rejection of an undeveloped mind.

The ancient Greeks lived in an age of great sculpture. We do not find in their writings praise or blame of such works. Criticism originally arose with them in connection with the decline of Hellenic drama, in the Middle Ages books of aesthetics, pointing out the aims, the failures or successes of the architectural magnificence springing up in town and country, were unthinkable. When man has lost the power to create things of beauty he becomes aware of the nature of these. He becomes a critic.

To become aware of the nature of any idea or state of being is to have passed, for better or for worse, beyond it. With the loss of innocence came knowledge of both man’s physical nakedness and his need for a covering. Constant preoccupation with an idea is usually symptomatic of immediate unattainability.
Towards State-Controlled Medicine
Authors: Badenoch A. G.
Published: July 2007

Poor people do not differ from rich people in this natural characteristic, that they both like to have individual medical attention and realise that the best way to obtain this is to pay a reasonable fee to the doctor of their choice. Nevertheless one meets many people of all classes who make, sometimes grudgingly, the admission that they think a State Medical Service would be a good thing.

There are several causes of this discrepancy. In the first place, it is by no means confined to medical matters. More than ever since the Second War, some commodities are badly distributed and many of us have got into the way of thinking that nationalisation, or control by the State, offers a satisfactory solution. This is a trend of the times, and statistical statements have got us into the habit of supposing a ‘trend’ to be something inevitable. Eor instance, this was the defeatist talk some years ago of many doctors who were by temperament, by training and by reasoned conviction opposed to State Medicine as a bad thing for the people: they summed up wearily by saying that it was all a trend of the times and there was no resisting it. Another attitude, less easy to dispose of, was, and is, to point to the many defects in our present medical services and to suggest that State control at least offers a remedy, no other being available.
A Study in Integrity
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

What do we mean by ‘integration”? A creature is integral when it possesses all it needs for its perfection and completeness. A thing can remain essentially intact without being whole or integral. A car on its trials with engine, wheels and chassis only is essentially a car but it has no integrity. Or again we use integrity of a character that has preserved the wholeness of a good moral life or of fidelity to truth, as opposed to the one who has compromised either of these perfections by his conduct or dishonesty—for even should he repent he will lack something; he will lack that unity of a life unbroken by sin. By integration, then, we mean that quality of wholeness which is given to a thing when it is finally completed; and when applied to human life this quality can only be gauged with respect to the whole of life from childhood to old age, a life begun with a certain perfection given by God the Creator, but with a hundred conflicting possibilities and powers which have to be co-ordinated into a whole, i.e., integrated.

It is just this element of intactness which is absent in modern life. We manage on the whole to preserve the essentials of life for we continue, at least barely, to Jive. But there is no sense of completeness about it. Our home life is one thing, our work another, our leisure another, and our religion something apart from all these: all are divided off into separate compartments.
Liturgy and Spiritual Exegesis (II)
Authors: Bouyer L.
Published: July 2007

By now we should be able to understand without being disturbed or disconcerted how deeply this process of ‘Allegorization’ is bound up with the flowering of the New Testament. We have now gone beyond the form to the essence of the Gospel message. After the explanations we have given, we need no longer fear to say it; the very concepts, the fundamental ideas in the preaching of Jesus and the Apostles are now revealed, not simply in their imaginative clothing but in their most intimate substructure, as allegorisations of ideas in the Old Testament. To prove this we will consider just three ideas, but they are the most central in the New Testament: that of the Kingdom, of the Messias, and of Sacrifice. On these three themes alone all Christian dogma could be reconstructed.

Where do they come from? How do they arise? It is unnecessary to point out the place assigned to the Kingdom in the preaching of our Lord as given in the Synoptics; that preaching is the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ and nothing else. But where does the idea itself come from? One can assign it a double origin; on the one hand the old eschatological concept (going back to the origins of the religion of Israel) of the ‘Day’ when ‘all will be changed’, when God will intervene in the affairs of this world as an all-powerful judge and will re-establish all things in conformity with his will. And on the other hand the ‘mother-idea’ from which the expression ‘people of God’ arises.
The Intellectual Apostolate in South Africa
Authors: Versfeld Marthinus
Published: July 2007

What I wish to do here is to touch upon some points in the intellectual and cultural situation in South Africa. This means that I must confine myself to a picture of what Europeans are doing, since the disadvantages under which non-Europeans are labouring have not made possible for them much acquisition of the natural goods. The Church in South Africa is above all an African church. Europeans, and especially European Catholics, are in a minority. Hence I shall be dealing with a minority which has largely monopolised the privileges of education and which must therefore be held peculiarly accountable for the use of the treasure which it has appropriated. My further reason for thus confining my field is the large part being played in the conversion of South Africa by the Dominicans who are so well versed in grafting the Faith upon the higher activities of the natural man.

In estimating the influences which have formed the mind of South African Europeans one must be careful to give full weight to the positive contribution of Calvinism, especially the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church. The original colonists were Dutch and French Protestants, and the great majority of their descendants still hold to that confession, seriously and conservatively, as a rural population will. It is a tradition which has fostered Bible-reading, a strong and genuine family life, and the virtues enjoined by the Decalogue. It has been favourable to the formation of a legalistic and patriarchal temper of mind, and has kept alive a strong antipapist animus. It is not within my province to estimate the religious situation, but rather to call attention to certain repercussions in the cultural sphere.
The Wrath of God
Authors: Still Dorothea
Published: July 2007

I once knew a charming lady, somewhat top heavy with titles, who had a delicious assurance that all things she desired were hers by the right of desiring. As we walked down Bond Street she would glide through shop doors, ordering whatever took her fancy. Because of the titles the goods were sent without question. Much later she would be astonished and dismayed by following bills. With cries of distress she would rally those friends to her side whose cognomens were less rare but whose view of life included the inevitability of payment.
The Language of the Greek Fathers
Authors: Graef H. C.
Published: July 2007

As the catalogues of the publishers show there is a great revival of interest in the study of the Fathers, especially the Greek Fathers, so long overshadowed by their better known and more accessible Latin brethren. If we read that the Editions du Cerf have already brought out translations of authors as comparatively little known as the apologist Athenagoras, the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, John Moschus and Maximus Confessor, a new spring of patristic studies seems indeed to be upon us, and from America there come the translations of St Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians and of the Seven Letters of St Ignatius. Will England, whose interest in the Greek Fathers has always been particularly keen (we need only remember the work of Newman and Pusey, of Lightfoot and Prestige) take no part in this renaissance?

It is hoped that, in a few years’ time, there will be brought out in this country a great and fundamental work, which has been in preparation for about forty years. We are referring to the Lexicon of Patristic Greek, begun in Cambridge in 1906 under the editorship of Dr H. B. Swete, and transferred to Oxford in 1915, for which material has been steadily collected throughout these years. Under the editorship of Dr F. L. Cross, the present Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, assisted by a small and harmonious team of Catholic and Anglican collaborators, this work has now entered on its final stage, in which the immense material, assembled in a large room in the New Bodleian Building, is being sifted and put into shape.
Notre Dame — Saint Alban
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

On the outskirts of Lyons a vast monolith of a hospital commemorates the secular patron of that city of martyrs—Edouard Herriot. You take the bouncing tram from Place Bellecour (the Germans stole the trolleybuses), and at Blanche Grange you enquire for the church of Notre Dame—Saint Alban. It is hidden away behind the clinical cliffs of the hospital, and there is little enough about this plain box of a church to make it remarkable. But it is precisely here, amidst a sprawling suburb of flats and hostels, of workmen's dwellings and doctors’ villas, that for the last twenty-five years the abbé Laurent Remillieux has built up a Christian community which by this is known throughout France and beyond.

How did it happen? Père Chéry, who in his Paroisse Communauté Missionaire so vividly recorded the achievement of the Abbé Michonneau in the industrial parish of Colombes, has now published an account of the Lyonese parish which goes far to answer that question. Even the casual visitor to Saint Alban is aware that this is no ordinary church; or rather that here is a most ordinary church in which is realised the true function of a house of God, the meeting-place of God’s people, a living community of the faithful made one per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso.
Easter Customs in Poland
Authors: Kreutza A.
Published: July 2007

Saint Paul insists, as we know, on the idea that the whole of Christianity depends on the fact of Christ's Resurrection. ‘If Christ has not risen’, he says, ‘our faith is vain and our hope groundless’, adding at once, ‘No, Christ really has risen from the dead, and I am witness to that’.

In Poland this thought of Christ’s Resurrection in addition to being a fundamental article of religious faith, had also a deeply patriotic and national meaning. During the period of enemy domination the feast of the Resurrection, the Christian Easter, became as well a symbol of national resurrection. Each of the faithful who spoke of the risen Christ, the conqueror over death, joined thereto in his heart another thought and sentiment—his lively and fundamental hope in the resurrection of Poland. That is what gave Easter, on both the traditional and the religious side, a very special colour which made its old popular customs still dearer, more intimate and more venerable. We do not know how the Easter festival can be observed in Poland at the present day, but we may be sure that no Pole behind the Iron Curtain ever lets go his steadfast hope of seeing his country really free and returning to life.

The season of Lent has had in Poland for centuries a special popular service, the singing of the Lamentation*, or Bitter Mourning for the Passion. This must not be confused with Tenebrae in Holy Week. It is sung in church several times a week, usually on Wednesdays and Fridays and also on Sunday evenings.
Claudel's Poetic Art (II)
Authors: Ryan Mary
Published: July 2007

Fully to understand Claudel’s theory of poetic-expression we must follow his analysis of movement. Being, self-existent, is motionless; created things, both matter and spirit, are in movement. This motion imprinted on them by the Creator-Spirit gives them their sense : we have seen how much Claudel means by that word. He uses the metaphor of flight (/wife) to express their movement out from the Creator; but their origin is also their end (fin, goal and limit) and they are moving back thither. ‘Now every movement results in the creation or maintenance of a state of equilibrium’ (p. 75), but only through a constant tension because everything other than complete and self-sufficing Being is in a condition of ‘interplay and contradiction’ (p. 147). Man, like other creatures, is perpetually in movement for ‘there is movement wherever there is variation in existence’.14 It may be a movement of inner vibration tending to produce the form; or a movement of efference or outward process.

That the whole of creation, even inanimate, is in a state of alternating movement is also a hypothesis of modern science. But while its materialist exponents ‘observe the working of a machine’, the Christian thinker ‘enjoys the use of an instrument’ (Art Poetique, p. 28). For these changes, contacts, responses, man has, in common with the animals, senses: sensation is the first phenomenon of our activity, but we are not, like the animals, passive under it. Our senses are our tools: ‘as we learn the use of a tool by apprenticeship so we educate our senses’ (id. p. 91).
Nicolas Bardyaev and the Russian Idea
Authors: Vereker Charles
Published: July 2007

The birth of an innumerable quantity of new generations I cannot reconcile us to the death of one single man.’ These words of Nicolas Berdyaev come towards the end of one of his latest works to be translated into English, The Russian Idea; and it has since transpired that they were written also near the end of his own life. They may serve as a fitting epitaph to the life and work of one who will not easily be replaced, and whose labour of interpreting the Russian world to the West was among the most pressing tasks of our generation in a field in which the labourers are still tragically few. His passing, therefore, is at once a blow and a challenge. We have lost one who undertook what few are willing, and fewer still are equipped, to do. But because the work must be done, it behoves us indeed not to be reconciled to his death, but rather to be emboldened by it.

It is difficult in the stormy moment of an historical crisis to reflect at all calmly on the deeper issues below the surface of the political and military hubbub. Thought about the Russian question is almost paralysed by the very fact that everybody is thinking about it. The temptation to reduce a complex conflict to the simple categories of friend and enemy, of ‘them’ and ‘us’, necessarily destroys that effort to find common ground or at least to understand the motives and purposes of the beloved enemy.
“Mr Councillor”
Authors: Walsh R. P.
Published: July 2007

It is true that the Christmas message of Pope Pius XII was directed to international affairs but much that he had to say has a direct application to lower forms of government.

Division, insincerity, discord and mistrust are not faults that are confined to those politicians who parade on the international field but are to be found, perhaps to an even greater extent, among minor politicians. One may hope that the better men rise to the top and that among Members of Parliament there is a greater moral sense than is to be found in the general public.

In this country there must be nearly 64,000 councillors serving a wide range of authorities from the Parish Council to the glorious heights of the County Council.

A democracy depends on such people. They can be a defence against the abuse of power on the part of the central government. Governments do tend, as Pius XII points out, ‘once they have won power and feel the reins securely in their hands . . . (to) . . . gradually drop the veil and pass by successive stages from oppression of the dignity and liberty of man to the abolition of all authentic and independent religious life.’ This exaggerates the dangers present in our country, but no one, irrespective of his politics, who thinks about fundamentals, can deny that there are dangers. It can be argued that the present generation of political leaders will not abuse their power. Yet the power is there and can be abused, if not today then in a few years’ time.
Life from the Dead
Authors: Oesterreicher John M.
Published: July 2007

In the material order, a man owns whatever he keeps; in the spiritual order, however, we own what we give away. The grace of election, given us so freely, is not bestowed upon us as if we were alone in the world, and without neighbours in sight; citizenship in the Kingdom of God is granted us that we may share it. No one can be a Catholic who is not a missioner at heart, who does not wish, pray, and work that all may be one in the Lord. And of all the apostolates, that to Israel is not the least. Her return to Christ is the last particular intention of our Octave, because it will be near the end of ages that the whole of the people comes to him. But though last in time, it is by no means last in rank.

The Church of Christ is the Israel of old, prolonged and extended—nay, renewed in youth like the eagle, enriched and fulfilled. ‘We are the House of Israel. We are Israel, the vineyard of the Lord,’ says an early Christian writer, (Pseudo Ambrosius, s. 58, n. 2; P.L. 17; 723) And another calls Abraham ‘the Father of the Church.’ St Augustine goes further; he makes the Church speak: ‘When God blessed Abraham, it was I he promised. The blessing of Christ, I am indeed spread through all the nations.’ (De Fide Rerum, 5; P.L. 40, 174) Each year, on Holy Saturday, before the blessing of the baptismal font, the Church herself remembers that in the Christian eon the miracles of old shine anew, and that what God’s mighty arm wrought when he freed from the yoke of Egypt the One People, he works now for the Gentiles in the waters of regeneration.
Catholics and the Cecumenical Movement
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The Lambeth Conference and the World Council of the Churches at Amsterdam, held this summer, have brought the question of Christian Unity once again into the forefront of consciousness, even for Catholics. Now that they are over and their results made public it seems worth while to consider from the Catholic standpoint what value their efforts are likely to have in fostering a Christian Unity which is founded upon Truth. For us in England this will mean primarily a consideration of Anglicanism, for it is very evident, even from a superficial observation of the growing desire for unity among non-Catholic Christians, that the Church of England plays a dominant part in its development and will determine to a great extent the forms it will take in the future. What is happening in the Church of England therefore is a matter of capital importance if we wish to assess the value, in terms of truth, of the work being done by the œcumenical movement.

This brings us to a fundamental question not always squarely faced by Catholics. Does it matter what happens in the Church of England or in any of the Christian bodies which owe their origin to the Reformation? What is our attitude to these bodies as organisations? Is it of the slightest importance, as far as truth and true unity are concerned, which direction they take, or what arrangements they make among themselves for furthering their own coherence?

The view of the majority of Catholics would probably be that it matters not at all.
Georges Bernanos
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

With the death of Bernanos, France lost more than a novelist. His was the authentic voice of a tradition that is older than a nation and which will surely outlast it. It is true that he wrote novels, and they were supreme in their perception of human destiny, incomparable in eloquence and passion. But the form of them was an instrument, not an end, and the professional critic may readily discover an indifference, even a contempt, for the nicely-ordered ingenuities of fiction. Bernanos was a prophet for whom the novel, or indeed prose as such, happened to be a trumpet to which his own generation might be enticed to listen. He believed in God and he believed in God’s hand at work in the affairs of men. For him the only ultimate truth was the plenitude of divine life, and he looked with an unfaltering vision on a world in which that life was usually ignored, sometimes acknowledged, but which in every case was the arena of a conflict that can end only with the Last Judgment of all. The popular success of the Journal d ‘un Curd de Campagne made a central idea of Bernanos’s familiar to readers to whom Sous le Soleil de Satan or Monsieur Ouine might seem intolerable, unreadable, remote. The huge weight that hangs on moral choice became increasingly for Bernanos a truth to be revealed not merely in the high moments of human tragedy but constantly, at every turn of the head, at every neutral gesture.
Shall We Lose Our Schools?
Authors: Woollen C. J.
Published: July 2007

A Priest remarked recently that the education authorities had no intention of taking away their schools from Catholics, but merely of making it impossible for them to be continued. In that he was only expressing what has become obvious to everyone who has had much to do with the administration of the Education Act of 1944.

First, there are questions of conscience to trouble the teacher. Morally he or she is responsible to the parents; legally to the education authority. Already problems are being posed that make for conflict between the two loyalties. The teacher’s duty is clear; the choice may not appear similar to that which faced St John Fisher and St Thomas More, but it becomes so when it is a question of refusal to sacrifice principles that are rooted in the Faith. The penalty for refusing may not be so great, but as time goes on the testing may well become more severe.

There has been reason for disturbance in the proposed Schools ‘Record Card’. This has been described as a ‘secret dossier’. It was recommended by the Report of the Committee on the Juvenile Employment Service, and its basic suggestions were accepted by the Government, and have begun to be implemented by some local authorities. The Report required comprehensive information about every child, including not only his or her attainments but details about character, use of leisure, and a report on the home and parents. This was described as ‘a highly confidential document’. One form issued bore the heading that it would ‘under no circumstances be communicated to parents’.
Perfect Chastity
Authors: Lavaud Benoit
Published: July 2007

Most men and women choose marriage as their road in life. They can and ought to sanctify themselves in their love and . through it, by using their rights as they would use any other holy thing and faithfully fulfilling the duties of their married state out of love. For Christians, marriage is a sacrament, a sensible and effective sign of the grace conferred for the needs of the baptised couple. Their union is sacramental.

One of the principal tasks for Christian schools and Catholic Action to do is to make the splendour and sanctity of marriage intelligible to everybody, to prepare and help people to live the married life of holiness. . . . Nevertheless, obstacles to sanctity, or at any rate hindrances to the easy and prompt exercise of the love of God, abound in this state of life. I am not speaking of the abuses and sins properly so-called to which married people succumb when they are unfaithful to the graces of their sacrament, when they despise the laws of human nature and the commandments of God. These sins turn men completely away from God and of themselves lead to eternal death, unless repentance intervenes. What I am speaking of is a married life that respects the rights of God. Husband and wife—and precisely those most in love with each other—run the risk of taking too much natural pleasure in each other, of monopolising each other and not thinking of God as much as they ought if they are to sanctify themselves and advance together in the love of God.
The Case for Exorcism
Authors: Woollen C. J.
Published: July 2007

Diabolical possession is the devil’s hideous parody of the union between Christ and the soul in the spiritual marriage. Whereas the marriage of Christ with the soul is the consummation and seal of a union by grace long adorned with the constant display of acts of heroic virtue, the diabolical counterfeit is achieved usually after the subject’s long-continued and progressive indulgence in vice. The comparison is introduced only to indicate the nature of possession. Nor is it exact, for whereas Christ can possess only the souls of the good, it would seem that diabolical possession can sometimes occur when there is no deep-rooted habit of sin, and even in persons noted for holiness of life.

It is possible, however, that many records of supposed diabolical possession have not distinguished properly between ‘possession’ and ‘obsession’. In possession proper the grasp of the devil acts as a directive force; he can influence conduct. Nevertheless, the connection between man and his diabolical control is not strictly as between slave and master; it is more a partnership, in which the devil has the controlling interest. The man does not cease to be a man, nor to behave as a man. People may rave and blaspheme under diabolic influence; but they may also behave quite ‘properly’. They act always the part that suits the enemy of souls for the time being.

Obsession, on the other hand, is an incomplete and less disastrous form of diabolical influence. It operates chiefly through the imagination, and its effect is to worry or torture the mind, with less direct compelling force than in the possessed soul.
Religion and Culture
Authors: Lienhardt R. G.
Published: July 2007

Most primitive peoples are without anything which we should call a theology, and civilised people often know as little about their systematic theology as though they were without it. Such people live their religions, without regarding them also as subjects for investigation. If they do investigate, it is with the intention of showing the truth of their religion, or of being reassured in its truth, or of understanding more of that truth. Religious controversy has always been about other matters than the value of religion, and between people who practise some form of religion this is still so. It does not occur to them that religion has a ‘value’ or alternatively no ‘value’ for society; what can be evaluated are particular religious beliefs and practices. The study of religious beliefs and practices, however, has tended to fascinate those who do not practise any religion, and would claim to have none. Mr Dawson has quite naturally found it impossible to ignore such a public, and the literature on which it has been formed and fed.

No man would attempt to write upon the legal system or economic transactions of another society, still less of Society, without first taking stock of his knowledge of such matters in his own country, and without in some way systematising what he supposed to be law and economics at home. Religion, unfortunately, has been served like art, which everyone supposes himself to be versed in, without either the labour of study or the familiarity of practice.
Our Catholic Heritage
Authors: Long Edward T.
Published: July 2007

While it is generally realised that the vast majority of the ancient churches of England, built by Catholics for Catholic worship, are now in Protestant possession, it is less universally known that there yet remain up and down the country a few old chapels and other buildings which are a legacy from the ages of Faith and still used for the purposes for which they were erected; these include several instances of part possession of a medieval church, as at Arundel (Sussex), Broughton in Craven (Yorkshire) and Mapledurham (Oxfordshire). Others like Buckfast Abbey, Minster, Padley, Salmestone and Shorne (Kent) have been recovered by their rightful owners after centuries of alienation, and it is to be hoped that this process of recovery will continue and be intensified in the years to come.

The possession of these precious memorials of our Catholic past lays upon us the obligation of watching over them with unceasing care and sparing no pains to assure that they are handed on intact to future generations. The more we regain the greater will be our responsibility. Then there are the hidden chapels of penal times, often in the attic of a country house, or masquerading as a stable or warehouse, where the faithful met for worship at the risk of their lives, or at any rate of their freedom. Finally we should not overlook the fact that many churches of historic interest and sometimes of high artistic merit have been erected since the first Catholic Relief Act of 1778.