bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Early Religious Stages
Authors: Bacchus Francis
Published: July 2007

John Henry Newman was born in Old Broad Street in the City of London on February 21st, 1801, and baptised a few weeks later in the Church of St. Benet Fink. His father, John Newman, was a London banker. His mother came of a Huguenot family which had settled in England and prospered. There was nothing remarkable about Newman’s early religious training. He was encouraged to take delight in reading the Bible, and learning the Church Catechism. This seems to have been about all. Neither of his parents were attached to any particular school or party in the Church of England. The contrary is still often asserted, especially with reference to his mother, who is credited with pronounced Evangelical or Calvinistic views. But this was positively denied by his brother, Francis Newman, and by his sister, Mrs. John Mozley, and also by the Cardinal himself in a hitherto unpublished letter. It is a pity that these denials never came to the knowledge of the late Canon Barry, for the fiction of the Calvinistic mother owes much of its vogue to his able pen. The fiction originated with Newman’s brother-in-law, Thomas Mozley.
The Witness of the Parochial and Plain Sermons
Authors: Dix Fabian
Published: July 2007

Centenaries ecclesiastical and secular have of late years crowded so fast upon one another’s heels that they have become almost dangerously popular. Cathedrals, abbey ruins, tombs of poets and birthplaces of novelists have beckoned to the devout or the sightseer and in every case the char-a-bancs have made reply, and the newspapers have risen to the occasion. A hundred years ago the staid respectability of the Established Church of England received a shock, and though at the time very few of its members knew with certainty what it was all about, the vast majority were quite sure that it was something very shocking. Rumour had it that while courtly prelates maintained a dignified isolation in their palaces and country squires dozed peacefully in their pews an insidious band of cultured divines with Oxford as their plotting ground, were seeking to change the features of the National Church so completely that even its most intimate friends would experience no little difficulty in recognising it.

Among that select group around which the battle raged, three names stand out prominently, but while Pusey lent his name to denote the adherents of this brave endeavour and Keble blunted the enemy’s sword by gentle verse making, John Henry Newman is the man whose name leaps to the tongue and captures thought whenever mention is made of the Oxford Movement.
A Synthesis of Sexual Ethics
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

Though in the domain of Dogma much has been done in recent years towards re-establishing the conformity between Faith and Reason, in the domain of Morals this is not so. On the contrary, we are confronted at the present time with a rupture between Catholic moral teaching and secular ethical thought which is far more disastrous than the nineteenth-century quarrel between Religion and Science. In no sphere is this rupture more manifest than in that of the ethics of sexual relationship and in the conceptions of society and of individual conduct dependent upon it. The problem does not, indeed, present itself to the average Catholic in these general terms, but in the more pressing form of the concrete case—in the opposition between the teaching of the Church and of the world around him on marriage, on the family, on chastity, on divorce, on birth-control and the rest. The devout Catholic will loyally accept the teaching of the Church on these several heads, but not many, perhaps, are able to give that teaching an intelligent assent; few are conscious of a consistent, coherent policy or doctrine underlying the Church’s precepts, which consequently are apt to appear as so many disconnected, arbitrary and unintelligible hardships; fewer still realise the essential conformity, not to say identity, between Christian moral law and right reason or common sense. Not seldom must the Church’s uncompromising teaching regarding, for example, ‘hard cases’ which seem to indicate divorce, sterilisation or contraception appear to the thinking Catholic as incomprehensibly harsh and irrational, and only by a blind act of faith can he accept it and stifle the protests of his own reasoning.
Æsthetics in Worship
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

If we consider religious art, not as an end in itself, but from the religious point of view, we may distinguish two processes at work, the one a perfecting, the other a beginning. Just as machinery has two purposes, the one to produce leisure, the other to use that leisure, so two similar purposes may be discovered in religious art. It is either intended to lead from the senses to internal acts of religion —Faith, Hope, Charity and the rest; or it is intended to express these acts in the external world of sense. Men will sing to keep up their spirits under depressing conditions; but they will also sing for the very joyousness felt in their hearts. A sculptor may carve a statue of Our Lady because he venerates her deeply and wishes to express his devotion, or because the priest requires one in the village church to encourage among the villagers devotion to Our Lady. These may be termed the inward and the outward movements of religious art; for the one leads in from sense perception to prayer, the other goes out from prayer to the visible manifestations of prayer. In other types of art these movements may be quite accidental. In religious art they follow its primary purpose.
Law and Labour
Authors: Pottmann Karl
Published: July 2007

The above title may cover a wide field of social problems and of social legislation. Indeed, modern society, faced with a very complex social situation arising from a highly developed economic structure, has built up a system of laws, hardly less complex than the social conditions they were intended to deal with. Yet despite factory acts, social insurance schemes, and trade union law, the existing English law is insufficient to deal with the industrial problems of the present time. Some measures are necessary to alter the legal status of labour and of industrial relations. Although practical steps along these lines have beert frequently discussed at the meetings of Royal Commissions, and although some proposals of this nature have actually been realized in various English industries, the subject is still unfamiliar to the English public. Yet great importance is attached to such a way of social reform in other countries and considerable success has been achieved by it in Italy and Germany. While in the former of these two countries trade unions and employers’ organizations have become mere instruments of the State—a solution hardly acceptable in a country like England—in Germany there developed after the war a well-balanced Labour Law of whose particular characteristics many may recommend themselves to people in this country. We will therefore describe the status of Labour and of industrial relations as created by the new German Labour Law, comparing it with conditions in England.
Man be Merry
Authors: Kilbride K. M.
Published: July 2007

A Browse among mediaeval English Christmas Carols is an interesting as well as a seasonable pastime. From such collections of songs and poems as Sloane 2593, Eng. Poet. E.I., Brit. Mus. Addit. 5665, Trin. Coll. Camb. O.3, 58, Selden B. 26, and the Commonplace Book of Richard Hill, the grocer’s apprentice, Balliol 3541—to name not by any means all, but some of the most important sources of our knowledge of the subject—it is possible to gain an insight into the attitude towards Christmas revealed by these pre-Reformation popular songs. These collections, written down in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though many of them were probably composed at an earlier date, have happily survived all the vicissitudes and perils which beset the path of manuscripts. History has shown us that England was indeed no island of saints in those days, far from it. In view of this it is at least gratifying to notice how the carols which bear the undoubted stamp of songs of the people, capable of appealing to all grades of society, are full of the simplest and sincerest piety with an awareness and appreciation of the Incarnation as the basis of the joy which they express. The exhortations to be merry are innumerable, but it is merriment with a difference. No empty unmeaning frivolity, but a light-hearted gaiety founded on a very sure and overwhelming piece of good fortune. The danger has been very real, for
The Ideal of the Church
Authors: Goodier Alban
Published: July 2007

Let me begin with an assumption. I assume that I am speaking to an audience, every member of which has much in common with me. Above all we have before us a common end. We have a common desire that all believers in Jesus Christ our Lord, the true Son of the true God, should be one, even as He and the Father are one. We have all an ambition, and it is more than a mere Utopian dream, to restore in Christendom what we recognise as having been severed, ‘the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. One body and one Spirit: as we are called in one hope of our calling.’

Nevertheless, before I begin to say anything positive at all, I am conscious that there is a fundamental difference of outlook between many who kindly listen to me here and my colleagues and myself. Though in words we may seem to reach the same goal, we start from different standpoints. It is a difference, not so much of theological definitions as of philosophical first principles. We may profess to believe the same truths, we may express them in the same terms, and even in the same actions, yet, because of the different foundations on which we build them, they have not for us the same substance, or value, or solidity. Many, whether consciously or not, will not easily accept the external evidences, the objective truths, which to us, as to all Catholics, appear conclusive and convincing. To them truth is more subjective, more a matter of personal judgment, and personal interpretation, than it is to us; to them it is something that comes rather from within a man himself than from without.
The ‘New Deal’ in America
Authors: Donovan Vincent C.
Published: July 2007

The election results of November 8th, 1932, in the United States should have been expected. For as long as the human race has had popular elections the voters have been in the habit of putting out of power those holding office in a time of economic depression, and giving the others a mandate to try their skill in the handling of the weighty problems of government. In the United States, for instance, the election of 1840 reversed that of 1836 through panic. The panic of 1857 affected the election of 1860, as did also that of 1873 affect the popular vote of 1876. In 1893 Cleveland had to meet the same situation. Taft in 1908 is the sole exception proving the rule, and that was because he was the candidate of the still popular ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, and a discontented Democracy did not rally to Bryan. Now a tidal wave of votes sweeps Mr. Herbert Hoover and the Republicans out of Federal and State offices, and sweeps Mr. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats into power. It is the first time since before the Civil War that the Democrats have been in the majority in the nation, Vermont being the only State under undisputed Republican sway. Thirty-eight out of forty-eight States have Democratic Governors, and the State legislatures will be predominantly Democratic. Three-quarters of the House of Representatives will be Democratic and in the Senate there will be a Democratic majority of twenty-two. Out of five hundred and thirty-one votes, the electoral college cast four hundred and seventy-two for Roosevelt, and the people a majority of between six and seven millions. The bare cupboard of depression has vitalized the Democratic Party.
Stalin: A Man With a Machine
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

If (hypothesized Aristotle) if but the tool could do its own work, even as the automatons of Daedalus and the walking tripods of Hephaestus, then there would be no need of slaves and ‘prentices. And if (thought Antiparos of the water mill) we go on inventing things like this we shall certainly liberate our poor slaving women and return to the Golden Age. And Marx (who mistook the plutarchy born of the Reformation for Christianity) caustically observed that the ingenious Antiparos knew no political economy; and Aristotle not being a Christian could not conceive the intricacies of value-breeding process and other mysteries of industrial capitalism. Actually, the work of the machine, which according to Proudhon should be a protest of the ‘genius of industry against humiliating and murderous toil,’ is better described by the words which Ure applies to a modern factory, ‘A vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.’ Ure’s ‘benignant power of steam’ (quoted sardonically by Kautsky) does not extend its benign influence beyond its true lord and master, the capitalist (whose beaming benevolence pervades the whole working world).
The Language Question in Malta
Authors: Bonnici C. Mifsud
Published: July 2007

The Islands of Malta and Gozo are situated midway between Europe and Africa. Scientists contend that they are but the remains of a natural bridge which, in the oldest pre-historical times, united the two continents. To-day, these Islands are about fifty miles from Sicily and one hundred and eighty miles from the nearest point of Africa. They occupy almost the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, the theatre, up to 1492 when America was discovered, of all that written history records of past civilizations which grew and flourished round its shores. This has exercised a predominant influence on the Maltese Islands, which changed destiny and fortune with the rise of each new power holding sway in the Mediterranean Sea: Malta, since the remotest times, has always belonged to the strongest naval Power.

Archaeological remains on the Island speak of a civilization much older than that of the Phoenicians. These people knew Malta as a place of shelter, and confined themselves to its shores. But it is difficult to trace the race to which the aborigines belonged. All the theories on the subject are mere guess-work. A clue, however, of importance is to be found in the teeth of the so-called Neanderthal Man discovered during excavations at Ghar Dalam, and constituting a scientific basis to the much credited theory that Malta once formed a pillar of a bridge between Europe and Africa.
The Plight of Freedom
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

I was speaking to a crowd on Parliament Hill Fields. In answer to a persistent questioner whom I admired for his youth I said somewhat testily: ‘Freewill is not omnipotent; it is not the power of doing what we like, but of willing what we like.’ He replied at once, and as I thought, not without a certain nimbleness of wit ‘In other words, freewill is only the power of willing what we will.’ He laughed and I think the crowd laughed as if I had happened upon an absurdity.

For a moment I was numbed by the nimbleness of the reply and the spontaneity of the laughter. Then suddenly I saw how the youth’s paradoxical form of words had thrown light, where I had long wished light to be thrown, upon the essential action of freedom. I therefore looked my questioner in the face as I said: ‘Yes, free-will is essentially the power to will what we will. Other animals can will this or that, can will to run or to lie down—-can will to chase their quarry or to flee danger. But no animal wills to will. You can control a man’s body, and sometimes by controlling his body you can control his intelligence, but you cannot control his will. You may throw him to death over a cliff; but you cannot control him to will or not to will to be thrown.’
An Aspect of Russian Communim
Authors: Jensen G.
Published: July 2007

AN ASPECT OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM

Sir,

A correct understanding of Communism, both in theory and in practice, is perhaps at this moment the most important of all questions facing the civilised world. Therefore at the risk of tiring your readers I revert to it again. In a letter published two months ago your contributor, Fr. J. F. T. Prince, expressed the opinion that only personal knowledge of the situation could discredit the views expressed by him in a series of articles. As personal knowledge may always be questioned, whatever the qualifications of the writer, I prefer to give the translation of an official document, reference to which has already appeared in the daily Press. It is the report of Comrade Steinhart, head of the Politsector mtc (political section?), North Caucasus, to the Central Committee of the (Communist) Party, published in the official daily Pravda, Moscow, August 8th. A copy of this paper has been secured at the Soviet Bookshop, Bush House, and can be produced, if necessary. I believe it is now unobtainable. The translator has aimed at preserving the style and language of the original, though a few paragraphs have been curtailed.

‘REPORT

of Comrade Steinhart to the C.C. of the R.C.P. upon the safeguarding of the collective crops.

‘According to the initiative of the Political Section of North Caucasus a number of measures have been taken for the enlisting of the children of the collective farms (Kolkhosy) for the safeguarding of the harvest. On July 2nd the Kraikom (Regional Committee) of the Russian Communist Party agreed with the suggestion of the Political Section upon this question. Units of “light cavalry” formed from children of the collective farms and “pioneers” (soviet scouts) have already been organized.
Peace and Disarmament
Authors: Kirwan J. R.
Published: July 2007

In the Preamble to the Covenant of the League of Nations it is stated that the League is brought into existence ‘to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security.’ The first article of the Covenant which is concerned with policy (Art. 8) deals with the reduction of armaments. The League Secretariat accepts disarmament as the touchstone of the work of organizing peace. Peace is the end and the extent to which the nations of the world approach that end is to be judged by the extent to which they approach disarmament.

Just as peace is the end of the League, so is the demand for peace its foundation. But, founded also on the Treaties of Peace, it is, like them, grounded in war, partaking of the conditions of war, its ambitions, its hatreds and fears. It has then to obey two masters who do not always agree. Itself a result of the last war, it is called upon to prevent the next.

The position is further complicated by the fact that the demand for peace is itself largely a result of the War. Nothing so widespread and at the same time so deep has been known before as a force in international affairs. Though there was a demand for peace, nothing comparable existed before 1914. In England at least it did not exist until the Somme brought disillusionment, a disillusionment made more bitter by Paschendaele, March, 1918, and the submarine campaign. Born, too, of war, the demand for peace is based rather upon disgust and horror for the one than upon love for the other.
Catholic Tradition in Wales
Authors: Lewis Saunders
Published: July 2007

It is not merely because these words are penned in an hotel under the shadow of the Cathedral of Ghent that I remark upon certain associations between Belgium and Wales, certain important lessons that Wales might learn from Belgium. Recent literary researches have revealed the debt of Welsh poets of the fourteenth century to the Flemish town poetry of that period. In our own day some Belgian social works have attracted attention in Wales. Belgium like Wales is a small country, much industrialized, and Belgium has also a bi-lingual problem which it has settled or is settling in a manner that Wales would do well to study. In fact, Belgium is one of the small countries of Latin Europe from which Wales might learn some important lessons.

But more than this; Belgium is one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe and in the world. Now let us suppose that my fellow-Catholics in South Wales, who are mostly, one may presume, of Irish origin and very many of whose parents came there from Ireland during the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, had emigrated not to South Wales, but to Belgium, what would have been their history? We may assume with some confidence that they would to-day be Flemish-speaking citizens of Belgium, would have adopted Belgium as their own country, and would be enriching its civic as well as its religious life; would have become one with its people. But in Wales it has been otherwise.
St. Raymund and the Decretals
Authors: Farrell Ambrose
Published: July 2007

The present year marks two notable anniversaries associated with events which had wide spread importance, though very different results within the area of Law. The one was the publication of the famous Decretals of Gregory IX in 1234, a compilation of ecclesiastical law brought together by a Dominican friar, St. Raymund of Penafort, in the direction of centralization in Church government, which took its rise from the great Hildebrand, steadily but surely moved forward through the reigns of successive popes, and finally almost came to rest with Pope Gregory IX. Then there is that other most tragic event, three hundred years later, in 1534, the passing of the Act of Supremacy, whereby the death blow was struck at Canon Law, as far as England is concerned, and any lively influence that it might still have exerted on our own legal institutions was stifled at its source, though in shadowy forms it lingered on. But in the following year even the study of Canon Law was crushed out, when Cromwell as Henry VIII’s vicegerent visited the Universities and issued injunctions to the effect that lectures on the Decretals and the conferring of degrees in Canon Law should be abolished. The sequel was a notable depression also in the study of civil law in this country.

All but the prejudiced sectarian have come to acknowledge the Papacy as a wonderful piece of machinery and organization, not only within the sphere of religion and political prestige, but as a centre of law and government.
Joshua or Judges?
Authors: Foster P. D.
Published: July 2007

Our only English Dictator, Cromwell, has suffered from being sandwiched between a martyred and a merry monarch. And his rule of the Saints was not more acceptable to Cromwell’s contemporaries than his memory has been to us. But to-day, confronted by the prospect of everlasting government, not by Dictators, but Cunctators, we are changing front and on all sides above the click of knitting needles, the clink of port-glass or the clank of trucks, hear the cry: ‘We want a Mussolini.’

Rather more than a century ago, our attitude to the great revolutionary Corsican was to make a bogey of him: ‘Boney will get you.’ Then we opposed foreign political revolutions while inaugurating our own more fundamental Industrial one; to-day we admire the foreigners’ polity and only fight shy of it because it may involve a new economic system also. We cannot help thinking that we might like the Soviets no more than the Saints.
Social Unrest in Spain
Authors: Silva Ramon
Published: July 2007

Few, least of all the Catholic, will deny that the present social system with its manifest injustice cries out urgently for radical reforms, and it is to this task that some of the best Catholic minds in Spain are now applying themselves. The main problem is to win back the masses to the Church and to convince them that a true remedy for the social ills that afflict society is to be found in the papal encyclicals, and there alone. That the task is a difficult one will be realized from an analysis of Spain’s political panorama as it affects the proletariat. At the present time liberalism, democracy, and ‘reformist’ socialism are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival. A clear-cut alignment of social forces is taking place through the gradual elimination of all intermediary or ‘compromise’ parties. The issue daily narrows itself down to the choice between ‘integral’ Marxism and one of the brands of anti-Marxist Fascism; a Soviet workers’ republic or a strong government able to alter the whole structure of the State and introduce a measure of planned economy. Social unrest is no new feature in Spanish history of the twentieth century, but never has it reached such aggravated proportions as to-day. The introduction of lay education has provided the revolutionary parties with a rich recruiting ground, a none too surprising fact if we consider that no less a person than Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, once declared in a moment of frankness, ‘Give me the lay school, and I guarantee to provide you with a generation of revolutionaries.’
Very Silly Symphony
Authors: Berry Hugh
Published: July 2007

I ALWAYS read with the greatest interest the pronouncements of the two schools of theatrical critics of the Film, the ‘whole-hoggers’ and the ‘half-and-halfers’ : fairly represented respectively by Mr. St. John Ervine and Mr. Sydney Carrol. Mr. Ervine and the whole-hoggers—with whom I am not going to bother either myself or my readers here—regard a Cinema as exclusively a place for nit-wits to which nobody of the intelligence of Mr. Ervine would ever resort, unless the Film happens to be an exact reproduction of a successful stage play. The only reason advanced for the popularity of the Cinema is that admirably comfortable seats are provided, and that Jack and Jill can spend a much pleasanter evening there than at home. The half-and-halfers treat the Cinema with a benign tolerance, regarding it as the Theatre‘s rather inky baby brother, who requires occasional pats on the back but must on no account be spoiled by over lavish praise. ‘If,’ wrote Mr. Carrol, in an article in The Daily Telegraph some Thursdays ago,

‘you have any regard for the beauty and clarity of English speech correctly spoken, the grace and charm of English manners (in proper exposition), the sympathy and comprehension of English understanding, see that these precious things receive their tribute in the only place where they can be practised and reviewed at their best, the English Theatre.’

Now that may be very true and noble, but it led me to ask the question, is it relevant to the topic of the relations of the Theatre and the Film? The art of the Film should not, so all its greatest exponents constantly tell us, compete with the art of the Theatre; it should be complementary to it.
Reflections on The End of An Era
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

Dr Niebuhr has given us a book’ not unlike M. Berdyaev's End of Out Time. Both works lead us to deplore the complacency of Conservatism (as we know it) and the hypocrisy of Mercantile Christianity. Both books drive us to an alternative; with M, Berdiaeff we must choose between the humanistic individualism of the Renascence and Christian individualism, while Dr Niebuhr in impressing upon us the pharisaical injustice of this closing era would induce (it seems) an aggressive and vindictive Christianity.

While M. Berdyaev may be more profound and nearer to Catholic vision, we cannot deny that the author of ‘Reflections on the End of an Era’ is more startling—may even give us more food for thought; and we are provoked to examine for ourselves the antithesis accounting for the attitude indicated in Dr Niebuhr's book—as much as to insist on the only true remedy-a Revolution based on the charity of Christ, Catholicism. The spirit of Conservatism, if we take it to mean the spirit of sheer negative laissez-faire in matters of economic justice, is derived largely from a sense of well-being, a personal satisfaction which we wish to prolong. We prosper: those who are our immediate responsibility prosper: at least we do not want; the business of blind and wholehearted conservatism is the Past; and the Present is no more than its legacy. Our concern for the future is limited to our care for our present ease.
Also A Leader
Authors: Codd E.
Published: July 2007

A month or two ago, happening to be in Cologne, I looked in at the Church cf the Friars Minor to say a prayer at Adolph Kolping’s grave. Not that I felt that he needed any memento of mine, but because of those words he wished to be inscribed on the plain stone that covers his tomb:

Here Rests

Adolph Kolping

Born December 8th, 1813.

Died December 4th, 1865.

He asks for the charity of a prayer.

The little sanctuary was gay with the first spring blossoms, golden tulips and yellow daffodils ranged around the grave flanked by two great brown laurel wreaths with orange and black ribbons, the colours of the Catholic Journeymen’s Association, of which he was the founder. And they drifted in, by twos and threes or in little groups, as they always do, sturdy fair-haired lads with heavy rucksacks and dusty boots and knelt down before their Father’s grave to give him of their charity because he desired it so.

On this occasion, however, I noticed that they did not leave the church after they had said their prayer, but moved off to a little table near the altar rails on which lay an open book in which they all inscribed their names, I thought at first it was some sort of visitors’ book, until a notice caught my eye requesting that no candles should be lighted before the grave nor any other rite performed that might in any way anticipate the decision of the religious authorities and prejudice Father Kolping’s Cause.
Herman Bahr
Authors: Raybould A. N.
Published: July 2007

Herman Bahr's death in Munich on the 14th of January awakened many literary memories. A patriarch in the world of letters, Bahr's name had been identified with many of the thought-phases that had passed over Europe in the last fifty years. Though an unbeliever for the greater part of his life, Herman Bahr astonished his friends and associates by returning in later life to the faith of his lathers, as he had astonished them by accepting wholeheartedly the old Austrian regime after being a political innovator, even a socialist. His mind was a prism which had reflected the colours of many men's minds, a sort of kaleidoscope which recorded the passing pictures of his time, but with a certain and very marked stamp of his own. This is his special claim to interest.

Full of sympathy with the world in which he lived, a sympathy which never left him—for he remained a young writer in spite of his years—Bahr was always the man with his finger on the pulse of the times, who felt instinctively every change before it had declared itself; he was the literary barometer foretelling every variation in art and literature before such variations were observed by others. He called himself and was called by others the ‘man of tomorrow,’ and when he appeared as the man of yesterday it was because he saw in some distant yesterday an inevitable tomorrow.

An essayist, a novelist, a playwright, a wit, condensing into words the thought-fluids of his time, Bahr's mind changed with every passing year, until it moulded itself finally within the philosophy of the Catholic Church.
Preliminaries to Catholic Action
Authors: Quinlan John
Published: July 2007

I write, first, as one of the ‘young people ‘ to whom the advocates of Catholic Action seem especially to appeal and, secondly, as a provincial.

What exactly is happening in this Catholic Action campaign?

Now and then, at the invitation of devoted men, a lecturer from London or Liverpool descends to harangue us on Catholic Action or to show us some phase of its workings. Who are ‘us’? A group of people representing 1 in 1,000 of the available Catholic population, rising half-a-dozen times a year under the stimulus of a dinner or a dance to 25 in 1,000 and once each year, at a Sunday evening cinema-hall Rally, to 100 in 1,000. And of this weekly or fortnightly band, Apostolic in its diminutiveness at least, who are the regular components? A few married women, a few teachers, a few working-girls; to four of these add one man —a clerk, a plumber, a custom-officer or an out-of-work.

Now, when the lecturer has departed, what in the main is the idea left uppermost in the minds of the hearers of the word? During the lecture they have been galvanized and uplifted by the nobility of the appeal; inspired with generosity, they have been impelled towards the brink. But, as the words which pass betwen them show, when they endeavour to plunge from that brink of noble principles into the complexities of direct action in their own private lives and spheres of existence, they are partly perplexed and partly dispirited.
Catholic Action and National Life
Authors: Thomas H. C.
Published: July 2007

One day near the beginning of June Mr. Shane Leslie, in a letter to The Times, compared the Irish to the English as professional politicians to amateurs. It is a pleasing conception, the Mother of Parliaments retaining her amateur status, bringing with it a vision of a leisured and stately autonomy. At the same time there is something very admirable and winning about the continuous enthusiasm for politics that certain peoples display. But the admiration we English accord them seems to me to be that which we give to a child who is clever at his play. For a whole people to be politically effective, that was possible in the city-states of Hellas, it was the ideal of Rousseau, but, so we are told, it is out of the question in the modern nation State. We mark our ballot papers, having for the most part but the vaguest ideas of the particular issues at stake, and thus is the voice of the people heard; then and only then. But can this be really all? Are those only to be reckoned politicians who sit at Westminster or nurse constituencies? I do not believe it for a moment. The more benefits are conferred on us by the legislature, the more will our interests lie with it; and the more closely we seem to be entwined in the net of economic circumstance, the more we shall look to it for help and guidance.
The Novelist and Playwright in Catholic Action
Authors: Leitch N. S.
Published: July 2007

SINCE the preoccupations of an age are expressed in its current catchwords, it is perhaps not strange that our contemporaries should employ, in every context and without examination, the idiom of pseudo-economics in which is enshrined commercial wisdom. Among the stock phrases which recur in everyday conversations, and which appear to exercise an incantatory power over the minds of those who speak or hear them, ‘the law of supply and demand’ is most frequently evoked; not necessarily because the speaker is intimate with the workings of this mysterious law, but because it is intended to place the discussion, whether moral, political or artistic, upon a wholesome basis of commercial expediency.

Thus it is argued that in the work of the English playwright or novelist there is no scope for Catholic Action, not because of any incompatibility in the activities which it is proposed to combine, but because ‘the public does not want religion; there is no demand for it.’

Before trying the strength of this objection, it will be good to question whether a medium as comparatively frivolous as that in which either the playwright or the novelist works, can be employed in Catholic Action. To do this we must examine the common function of the playwright and novelist, which is to provide the public with a means of living vicariously, projected into an imagined existence, and thus forgetting present circumstances. Where there is great ignorance of the supernatural, such as religious ‘reformation’ has achieved in English-speaking countries, this escape from the apparent harshness of reality must become particularly desirable.
Lay Initiative in Catholic Action
Authors: Gordon Henry
Published: July 2007

There is a widespread, if inarticulate, misgiving about Catholic Action which needs ventilation and elimination. A particularly vehement layman might express it in some such terms as these :

‘Catholic Action? Ecclesiastical Fascism! A pretext for further encroachment by the clergy on the layman’s business! More clerical domination and interference! More paralysing of lay initiative and endeavour! Apostolate of the Laity! Clerical Gleichschaltung!’

The Englishman, especially, has a horror of being ‘organized.’ And organization, it is universally agreed, is of the very essence of Catholic Action. The adoption and organization of an oeuvre by the Hierarchy is precisely what makes that oeuvre entitled to be called Catholic Action. The local establishment and direction of Catholic Action is committed to the parochial clergy. Must we not then infer that the disgruntled layman is right?

The most effective way to disillusion him would be, perhaps, to take him abroad to countries where Catholic Action is really in action and is already fully organized and vigorous. Failing that, these few considerations may help to shake the prejudices.

All depends on what we mean by ‘organization.’ In the strict sense in which the word is applied to Catholic Action, organization, so far from imposing, excludes uniformity: it fosters rather than hinders individual initiative and enterprise. The point cannot be explained better than in the words of the Holy Father himself.

Organization in general means the unity of many members of which each preserves its own particular nature, functions and life, but which together pursue a common aim and concur in the formation of a single body, itself subordinated to one single vital principle.
Poetry and Intelligibility
Authors: Petre M. D.
Published: July 2007

Luminous shadow and dusky light.—We, who are not poets, but who dare to maintain that poetry is an essential element of our intellectual life, are just now the somewhat helpless witnesses of a discussion in which we are not invited to take a part; a discussion of experts; and yet a discussion in which we are deeply interested even if we be kept outside it.

There are two parties to that discussion; one for whom poetry has, essentially, no relation to thought, but springs from an emotion of the soul of the poet which he transmits to his hearers in words, indeed, but not in any kind of definite thought; the other, and older school, for whom thought is not, indeed, the whole of poetry, but is certainly one of its elements, and is of its very essence.

To take, first, the former school, as presented by one or two of its leading advocates.

Mr. A. E. Housman says: The human faculty which dominated the eighteenth century and informed its literature was the intelligence, and that involved, as Arnold says, ‘some repressing and silencing of poetry’ And again: When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, / cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas.

Again, although it is almost impossible to find pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning, yet meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.
Enlisting Revolution
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

In the uncertain associations it evokes, Revolution is hardly a word with one meaning. We may deplore the revolutionary economics of Karl Marx and applaud the revolutionary pedagogics of Don Bosco. The Revolte des Anges, Lucifer's assertion of self-subsistence and equality with God, the insolence of our first parents, were (it may be urged), no less revolution than the subversive mission of Jesus Christ who came to overthrow the powers of Evil, the false privilege and the unreal values they had inspired.

Or do we prefer to call Christianity counter-revolution —perceiving in it the re-establishment of human-divine intercourse, ultimate incorporation with God, through submission and service? Perceiving in Catholicism the subordination of self in contradistinction to the Satanic assertion of the Ego; service among men as opposed to the primeval assimilation of the meta-human, the snatching at the high-hanging fruit in the garden? Must we accept counterrevolution as the more accurate Christian nomenclature? For Joseph de Maistre, you will remember, insists that ‘Contre-révolution ne doit pas être une révolution contraire mais le contraire d’une révolution.’

Indeed, thus considered, the mission of Our Lord, consisting, as it did, in the reinstatement of humility, as opposed to revolt against the Divine Mind, was essentially counter-revolution. Revolution, de Maistre goes on to tell us, is essentially Satanic in that it is destructive and not creative (‘car détruire n’est pas faire’). Yet, while de Maistre and his fellows to-day insist that the nature of counter-revolution is non-revolutionary and purely reinstative, it is yet insisted in the same breath that its constructiveness does not derive ‘from hope of restoring the past.’
Film and Catholic Action
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand
Published: July 2007

In a letter to Canon Brohée, President of the Centre Catholique d’Action Cinématographique, His Holiness Pope Pius XI wrote, April 25th, 1934:

‘The discoveries of Science are also the gifts of God which we must use for His glory and the extension of His kingdom.

‘Catholics of all countries of the world ought to consider it a duty in conscience to busy themselves with this question which is growing in importance. The cinema is going to become the greatest and most efficacious means of influence, more efficacious even than the Press, for some films are seen by millions of people. It is therefore highly desirable that organized Catholics should occupy themselves constantly with the Cinema in their meetings to promote Catholic Action and in their programmes of study.’

On reading this letter the loyal Catholic might excusably heave a sigh of relief. Owing to the American Boycott much has been said for and against the Cinema. Some people have deplored its influence and condemned it as a medium; others have accepted it, but entirely misunderstood its power and therefore its danger; some of us have even ventured to make films . . . But amid this mass of conflicting opinion, one thing is now clear, that the Holy Father not only encourages the use of the Cinema, but considers that it is our duty to use it in the Apostolate. This in itself is a great step forward, and will relieve many a dubious conscience.
The Survival of Blessed Thomas More
Authors: O'Sullivan Richard
Published: July 2007

One of the noteworthy features of our time is the revival of interest in the life and letters of Blessed Thomas More.

These two new Lives of the Beatus are added evidence of this interest, and of its universal character. The one is by a non-Catholic Englishwoman, who is a scholar of the University of Oxford, the other is by a Catholic American, who is a member of the English Faculty at Harvard.

Though there are already (we are told by Miss Routh) twenty-four English Lives of More of different periods, one could not spare either of these new volumes. Of a truth, as Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth is here reported to have said, Sir Thomas More is one of the figures of abiding interest in History.

This multiplication of Lives of Thomas More goes with the reproduction of his English works in the elegant edition that is in course of publication by Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode under the general editorship of W. E. Campbell, with the co-operation of Professor A. W. Read, Professor R. W. Chambers and Mr. W. A. Doyle Davidson: a notable constellation of Catholic and and non-Catholic scholars. The publication in this series of Harpsfield’s Life of Thomas More has given us, from the pen of Professor Chambers, an enduring essay ‘On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School,’ the main thesis of which may be said to be that the English of Alfred survived as a literary language, during the centuries when French and Latin were the official languages of Law and Government, through the religious writings of Englishmen who wrote on mystical subjects for the use of English communities of religious women.
India's Connection With Britain
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E.
Published: July 2007

Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India? It makes one think of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of B. D. Basu's Rise and Consolidation of the Christian Power in India, of the Cambridge History of British India, and The Indian Empire. The title is entrancing—and not a little enigmatic: for the authors never tell the reader in so many words what exactly they mean by ‘fulfilment.’ Whatever it be, this History of the British Raj is as lively as the Cambridge tomes are stodgy, and as impartial as Major Basu is partizan: it refutes its own motto—a saying of the Iron Duke—’that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ Nothing is more needful to-day than that the British mind should thus attend: it will henceforth be able to do so, thanks to Messrs. Thompson and Garratt, without tears, though perhaps not without a good deal of mortification.

‘It is often said,’ observe our authors (p. 273), ‘that Britain acquired her Indian Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness: the epigram has been overworked. From Clive’s time onwards, British India never lacked minds seeing and planning far ahead.’ True, the Empire began as a mercantile adventure—and ‘of all the European interloping nations we were the last and most reluctant to draw the sword, even in defence’ (p. 5). Yet already in 1618 Sir Thomas Roe said: ‘Assure you, these people are best treated with the sword in one hand and caducean in the other’ (p. 17); and by 1641 the East India Company had fortified its factory at Masulipatam.
The Metamorphosis of Marxism
Authors: Berdyaev Nicolas
Published: July 2007

Which is the true heir of Karl Marx, Communism, Social Democracy, Bolshevism, or Menshevism? This is a much vexed question. The answer to it depends on the angle from which Marxism is viewed. If we stress the sociological determinism of Marx, then the Social Democrats must be recognized as more consistent Marxists than the Communists; but if we stress fidelity to the revolutionary spirit, then the Communists show more sign of it than do the Social Democrats who have lost it. The Communists alone, imbued with the messianic idea of the proletariat, are really consumed with a crusading ardour for the destruction of the old world and the building up of a new. And it is because Communism, as distinct from Social Democracy, thus assumes a religious character that it is hostile to and persecutes all other forms of belief.

But what are we to think of sociological determinism, which gives Marxism the character of a scientific socialism and distinguishes it from utopian socialism?