bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Christian Architecture
Authors: Purcell Donovan
Published: July 2007

The artistic record of the Church in England over the last hundred years is indeed a dismal one. Dull, drab and even ugly churches, in what passes for a period style, are furnished with clumsy woodwork, characterless plaster statues and fussy, over-decorated altars, exhibiting so often a general air of tawdriness which can scarcely fail to depress and may actually repel a seeker after peace and beauty in God’s house. There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions; but no more than enough of them to prove the rule and to show the tremendous opportunities which lie within our grasp.

The reasons for this unhappy state of affairs are not difficult to discover or to understand. The restoration of the English Hierarchy, and the emergence of the Church from obscurity, took place at a time when artistic taste in this country had sunk to its lowest ebb. The classical tradition had had its last flourish in the first two decades of the century, in the form which we now call the Regency style. But it flourished then not as the accepted tradition in which all men worked and within which the genius of the time found new expression, but as one of several styles, an alternative to more exotic forms borrowed from the East, or to the revived ‘Gothick’ manner. There was no longer any accepted grammar of architecture, or any universal standard of artistic criticism. The Romantic Movement in literature had been followed in the graphic arts, and the paintings of Claude and Poussin had fired the imagination of patrons of architecture.
Catholicism in Africa
Authors: Mathew David
Published: July 2007

This brief introduction to the African number of Blackfriars can only suggest some lines of thought in regard to the progress and future of Catholicism among the African peoples. The following notes relate to the territories under British administration which lie between the Sahara and the Zambesi. The first and in some respects the happiest impact of the Catholic Faith on the African mind belongs to the period of the pioneer missionaries, largely French in their personnel and to an even greater extent French in their direction, working in a series of wholly tribalised societies. In those areas where there existed a powerful and hereditary chiefship it was often not difficult for the missionary to persuade the chief and his councillors that his coming offered no threat to established African authority. Speaking generally, the chief did not himself become a Catholic, but he was the missionary’s equal and friend and the recipient of much wise advice. It was within this framework that there was built up the system of catechists and the practice of giving such teaching to the children as was necessary to enable them to lead a Catholic life. It may be said that the survival of tribalism and its modern counterpart, the sense of African nationhood, are conditions favourable to the development of the Catholic Church in Africa. Detribalism on the other hand is inevitably unfavourable and no group is more in need and less accessible than the detribalised urban proletariat.

No religion will appeal to the African who is still working on the land unless it respects ancient traditions and is not inimical to his pride of nationhood, whether that be Ibo or Yoruba, Baganda, Bahaya, Kikuyu or Chagga. This national consciousness should never be impeded either in the African priest or in the African layman.
What Can Missions Achieve?
Authors: Magrath Oswin
Published: July 2007

In spite of a steady tradition in the official documents of the Church, there has long existed, and still persists, much vagueness about the aims of the Missions. This has its ill-effects on the methods and on the missionaries themselves, and on the support given to the Missions by the Church at large. A clear view of the matter is therefore of the first importance.

The encyclical, Evangelii praecones, of Pius XII, issued on June 2nd, 1951, and that of his predecessor, Rerum Ecclesiae (of which the first commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary), have given powerful directives in regard to Missions, and their prescriptions should remove many misconceptions. A more precise theology of the Missions is in the course of development, namely a branch of theology dealing with the expansion of the visible Church.

The fact which dominates the whole subject of Missions must be the purpose for which they are undertaken. Missionary activity is not synonymous with deep religious conviction as such, for there are many religions which have the character of a closed national or caste group, not easily permitting expansion beyond its limits. Such are most primitive religions, and some others such as Hinduism. Catholic Missions have a definite aim, and this has been stated clearly in the recent encyclical: ‘As everyone knows, these sacred expeditions have as their principal aim to bring the light of Christian truth more clearly to new peoples, to gain new Christians. The ultimate goal which they must strive to reach, and which must always be kept before the mind, is that of establishing the Church solidly among other peoples, and of giving it a hierarchy chosen from among the indigenous population.’ The establishment of the visible Church is the aim of the Missions.
Education in British East Africa
Authors: Walsh Richard M.
Published: July 2007

The object of this article is to present a picture of educational work among the African population, particularly that undertaken by the Church in British East Africa, with special reference to Tanganyika Territory, since the school organisation and the various problems connected with it in Tanganyika can be taken as typical of educational work in the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Kenya.

These three territories, which are as large as Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and the British Isles put together, meet about the shores of Lake Victoria. The total population is 17,600,000, of whom 7,500,000 are in Tanganyika and roughly 5,000,000 in each of the other two territories. The European population is very small in proportion, and is made up mostly of Government officers, save in Kenya where there is a white settlement of nearly 20,000. There are 11,000 Goans and an Indian community of nearly 170,000, small in numbers but economically very influential, since most of the trading, in Tanganyika in particular, is in Indian hands. The natural African unit is a tribal one, each with its own taboos, customs, laws, languages and chiefs; and where the administrative boundaries cut across tribal areas or group them into districts or reserves, the tribal organisation, with the chiefs’ barazas, is respected as far as possible.

The three territories which constitute British East Africa and the island of Zanzibar come within different political categories. Uganda and Zanzibar are Protectorates, Kenya is mainly a Colony with a narrow coastal strip formerly belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar and now a protectorate area, and Tanganyika is a British Mandate. The territorial boundaries are entirely the result of the European occupation of East and Central Africa at the end of the last century.
The Dying God
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.’ (John II, 50.) You will remember that those words are attributed by the Fourth Gospel to Caiaphas, and that it tells us that ‘he spoke not of himself, but being the high priest for that year, he prophesied’. We are told that it was this official utterance of the High Priest that decided the authorities to put Jesus of Nazareth to death.

This remarkable fact is nowhere mentioned, so far as I can recall, in the twelve large volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Yet the pronouncement of Caiaphas might well have served as a motto for the whole work. Frazer, combining encyclopaedic knowledge with rare literary grace and dramatic effect, and with much of the excitement of a detective story, set out to solve a mystery—the mystery of a haggard, hunted ‘priest of the wood’ by the shores of Lake Nemi long ago, a priest who had plucked a golden bough, a priest who had murdered his predecessor, and who was now sleeplessly awaiting his own murderer and successor. And you remember how clue leads to clue as Frazer’s vast researches fan out into space and time, ransacking the annals of history, archaeology, the literature of all nations, comparative religion, anthropology, folklore. Slowly there emerges the hint of a worldwide pattern of belief and practice according to which it is expedient that one should die for the people that the whole nation perish not; that the slayer and the slain should alike be some embodiment of divinity, a divine king or priest or his son, or some representative or substitute or effigy, whose death and torment is somehow necessary if the life or power which he embodies, and on which the people depend, is to survive or revive.
The Real Answer to Communism
Authors: Hyde Douglas
Published: July 2007

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.
The Unique Quality of Manzoni's Novel
Authors: Beaumont Ernest
Published: July 2007

M François Mauriac has left us in no doubt that in his view a work of art and a work of spiritual edification are two quite different things, rarely if ever combined within the pages of one book. The artist must conform to truth, that perception of truth which is peculiar to himself, and M. Mauriac implies that this truth will not, generally speaking, be edifying. In the ultimate analysis he has made the aesthetic truth which the artist must express dependent on the spiritual condition of the author, in so far as the spiritual elevation of the work is concerned. It is a matter, he has said, of purifying the source, the source from which the creatures of the imagination spring, if the artist is to produce work which testifies to the enduring strength of the spirit. Only a saint could write a novel free from taint, a novel in which sinfulness was not a dominant characteristic, provided of course that he possessed the necessary artistic genius, but the writing of works of fiction does not appear as a form of activity consonant with saintliness. The novelist, then, who is cursed with the gift of artistic creation, must go on perpetuating his sinfulness with all the aesthetic skill at his command until he has spiritually progressed to the point where he would cease to write novels. Such, if we are to believe M. Mauriac, would seem to be the unfortunate predicament in which the Christian writer finds himself, unfortunate, that is, if he does not achieve the saintliness that would end his artistic career.
The Enigma of Leon Bloy
Authors: Havard‐Williams Margaret
Published: July 2007

The readers of Léon Bloy can be divided, on the whole, into two opposing camps. Those who read his work primarily for its religious content see him as a pious Christian who vehemently protested against the evils of the modem world; and, even if his imperfections are recognised, few critics have attempted to explain or even reconcile the conflicting tendencies of his character. There are others, however, who frankly scoff at his Christian principles, finding it impossible to believe in the religious sincerity of a man who could live, during the greater part of his life, on the generosity of his friends, and could cover his enemies with violent scorn and abuse.

Few writers have penetrated very far into the motives and principles of this puzzling man: he is either dismissed as a literary joke, or accepted unquestioningly for the sincerity of his faith. The complexity of his character is, nevertheless, bewildering. The more we study his correspondence and diaries, the more uncertain we become of what he is setting out to achieve. Bloy seems to have lived his life on two distinct levels. He certainly saw himself as a modem St Francis, an apostle of poverty in a world of materialism, reduced to begging and borrowing from friends to provide his daily bread; yet contemporary records show that he spent a great deal of money on absinthe and amusements, and his poverty could undoubtedly have been mitigated by more careful management and foresight. How can Léon Bloy, fighter and hater of his fellow men, be reconciled with the Christian evangelist he claimed to be? How can the devout Catholic have been attracted by some of the most obscene tendencies in the literature of his day? The answer to all these problems can, I suggest, be found in a deeper penetration into the piety and the religious outlook of Bloy himself.
Science and the Trinity
Authors: Hastings Cecily
Published: July 2007

When we try to make contact, for the purpose of teaching and explaining the faith, with the pagan mind of our generation, something we might call ‘scientific mindedness’ at once arises as a barrier. (The inverted commas are strictly necessary.) We are not speaking of the truly scientific attitude but of a by-product, to be found both among scientists and among those several removes away from any field of scientific research. I do not mean by ‘scientific mindedness’ simply the attitude that demands tangible proof for every assertion made. Neither do I mean actual knowledge of recent scientific discoveries and theories, requiring particular answers to particular objections. The difficulty is really one of basic mental patterns. The more we are pre-occupied, as Christians, with the truths of revelation, the more these truths will determine the shape of our thinking and our approach to all questions, not only doctrinal ones. The unbeliever is not, of course, so shaped in his mind. But this naturally does not mean that his mind has no determinate shape. The basic mental patterns of the unbelievers of our day are, as we all know, to a large extent laid down by ideas stemming from the scientific discoveries and theories of die last hundred years. It does not matter that a particular individual has perhaps read very litde, even in popular works, of what these discoveries and dieories actually are. He absorbs his mental outlook from them none the less.

But the fact that his actual knowledge is probably slight deprives him of the riches of the scientific outlook, its humility before facts and its acute realisation of its own limitations, and leaves him with illegitimate by-products—a vague assumption of materialism, a vague conviction of the near-omniscience and nearomnipotence of ‘scientists’, and a vague certainty that practically every teaching that has not come directly from ‘the scientists’ has at some time, somehow, been discredited and disproved by them. Against this background we try to trace the truths of revelation.
Mental Illness
Authors: McFie B. S.
Published: July 2007

Our conception of mental illness has undergone a great change during the last half-century and many old misconceptions have been discarded. Lunacy, a purely legal term, which corresponds to no medical diagnosis, has slipped into the background and mental illness is recognised as a wide range of conditions of varying seriousness about which there is a growing body of knowledge and for which, to an increasing extent, appropriate treatment can be given.

The effect of this change is striking. Early in the century the only recognised provision for mental illness was to be found in hospitals known as lunatic asylums, which were administered under the 1890 Lunacy Act. These hospitals were designed for and restricted to persons who, owing to their mental condition, were incapabe of managing their own affairs and who, for their own safety or that of others, needed to be placed under care and treatment. Treatment was legally provided for, but in practice the emphasis was on care and protection, and since admission to hospital meant the deprivation of the patient’s liberty it followed naturally that elaborate provision was made for the prevention of abuse. It followed equally naturally that relatives and friends were reluctant to invoke the Act. The result was that the only hospitals able to provide resident treatment were closed to many who would gladly have taken advantage of it, and the Lunacy Act became only too often a barrier to treatment.
The Mystic and The World
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

The ‘ordinary Christian’ who is attracted by the magnetism of the ‘mystics’ is baffled by a problem that is hard to solve from a scrutiny of the lives of some of these contemplative saints, either because, like the Fathers of the Desert, they are virtually unknown to us in any intimate sense, or because their natural personalities, before their supernatural development takes place, do not appear to have experienced the need out of which this problem arises. A Saint Rose of Lima, for example, or a Saint Mariana of Quito, seem, from the usual accounts of them at least, to have had that capacity for living in an almost vacuum, the incapacity for which on the part of most people constitutes the problem here in question. St John of the Cross preaches his nada, and the admiring but ordinary Christian feels that even supposing he had the courage to deny self so consistently, how in fact would he carry out the programme of annihilation short of, in fact, ascending to the top of a very tall column and quietly settling down to starve? A temperament really directed to love of creatures, however many ounces of ash are sprinkled upon the dish of spinach, will always leap forward to delight in the grey and green colour-scheme. Solitude can never be absolute, and the Romanus who brings the hermit his food will surely be rewarded with his love. Is it possible to examine the lives of any mystics in sufficient detail to discover whether there is a solution to this difficulty, and even one which the ordinary man may, in due proportion, make his own?
Action: The Wavy Line
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

This year sees the fiftieth anniversary of the death at Tegernsee of Lord Acton, and the anniversary has been commemorated by the publication of two books, one adding to the small collection of Acton’s works in book form—now all out of print—and the other an analysis of his political philosophy. The only work of Acton published in his lifetime, apart from occasional essays in innumerable reviews both British and foreign, was his inaugural lecture, on The Study of History, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895. After his death, friends and disciples collected various lectures and essays into four volumes, and these, together with some incomplete collections of letters, are all that has been left to us of the man who was acclaimed in the latter half of the nineteenth century as being the most erudite in Europe. The more welcome then is the book of Essays on Church and State which is the first volume of what is to be a complete edition of Acton’s works. These essays have been chosen by Mr Douglas Woodruff, assisted by Mr Roland Hill, from Acton’s contributions to those short-lived but impressive reviews of the 1860’s, The Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review, and were all written when Acton was in his thirties. To this volume Mr Woodruff contributes an introduction whose chief merit is to tell the story of these reviews, of how the effort of the laity came to grief in its first attempt at a lay apostolate of the Press.
The Catholic Church and Ecumenism
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

A Reviewer in the August number of Theology has written that ‘Rome’s tragic rejection of the Ecumenical Movement is one of the challenges of our day, and it has yet to be faced and met’. By its context, a review of Salmon’s Infallibility of the Church, this rather cryptic sentence seems to imply that the nature of the Church (as Catholics conceive it) makes Catholicism essentially incapable of absorbing the spirit of Ecumenism. If that were actually the case it would be truer to say that Ecumenism rejects Rome, not that Rome has rejected the Ecumenical Movement.

In order to test the validity of this judgment it is necessary to define what constitutes the essential spirit of Ecumenism, and what are the aims to which it gives birth. But it is precisely here that a difficulty lies, because the Ecumenical Movement has been fluid in its development, originating in a spontaneous desire for Christian unity, due partly to the threat of world war during the first decade of the century, and partly to the problems set to missionary effort by divisions among Christians. The double source of the desire for unity resulted in the emergence of two tendencies within the growing movement. In one, emphasis was laid upon co-operation between Christian bodies, in spite of differences of doctrine.
Communism in Britain
Authors: Hyde Douglas
Published: July 2007

He Communist Party in Britain has at this moment only some 35,000 members. This makes it sound small by comparison with such Communist Parties as those of, say, France or Italy, which are millions strong. But if such a comparison is to be of any real significance we need to observe the different roles and the different circumstances within which they function.

In France and Italy there are no mass Socialist movements. The result is that the biggest mass working-class party there is the Communist Party. Under such circumstances the party consists of a hard core of well-indoctrinated, highly disciplined members, who know what they want, where they are going and exactly how they are going to get there, and a great mass of less well instructed members who follow the party ‘line’ most of the time but cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as well-instructed Marxists. The role of the hard core within such a party is to try to leaven the entire lump, to raise its ‘Marxist-theoretical understanding’ (to use the Communists’ own jargon) and to keep it constantly active on behalf of Communist policies.

In Britain, the workers’ mass movement is Labour-led and the Communist Party is small. Its role in such circumstances is precisely that of the hard core in the continental-type Communist Party, i.e. to make the great working-class mass as Marxist as possible and to activise it on behalf of Communism. Had the Labour Party been prepared to admit the Communist Party as an affiliated body (as it once hoped would be the case, and for which it runs campaigns from time to time), the job would have been made much easier for it. But early in its life it was disaffiliated and so, whilst seeing itself as the Marxist hard core of the wider Labour movement, it must do its leavening from outside, so far as the political wing of the movement is concerned, although it can work from within in the case of most of the trades unions and the co-operative movement.
English Versions of the Bible
Authors: Colledge Eric
Published: July 2007

History reveals to us few spectacles more awesome than the long procession of mortals who, undeterred by considering their mortal frailty, have set out to revise, re-edit, redecipher, retranslate the text of the sacred scriptures. Seventy-two Greek-speaking Jews locked up in a library, a hermit in a rocky wilderness, a whole monastery given over, year after year, to the collating of photostats: should the line stretch out to the crack of doom, we may be sure that the last newcomer will still believe that where his precursors have erred, he will find the right way, the just word. We may be sure, too, that his ‘Azymes’, his ‘Feast of the Skipover’, his ‘Give each other a hearty handshake all round for my sake’ will earn for him the unkind criticisms of those by whom, usually, he has not meant his version to be read at all. The translators, the emendators, the excisors, interpolators, forgers, the Urtexter-finder have all had their way with us, and yet we still contrive, century after century, to know more or less what the Bible is about; surely a most striking fulfilment of St Matthew xxiv, 35.

The late Father Hugh Pope, o.p., was attracted to the history of these undertakings as they have affected Britain and the United States; and in English Versions of the Bible (B. Herder, London, 1952; 75s.) we have a revision, first by an anonymous Benedictine and then by Father Sebastian Bullough, o.p., of the book which he had not completed at the time of his death in 1946. It is a vast work, beginning with Caedmon and bringing us down to 1950. It is questionable whether Fr Pope was well advised in seeking to compile such an exhaustive treatment of what is not one subject but three.
Fruit of Adversity
Authors: Smith Naomi Royde
Published: July 2007

Last year the 24th of August fell on a Sunday. A plaintive convert coming away from High Mass that morning was heard to wonder whether the Church commemorated any saint on November 5th. He was told that in the English Calendar the day, occurring in the octave of All Saints, is appointed for the honouring of such relics as any parish church might possess: elsewhere it is sometimes observed as the Feast of the seventh-century Abbess of Chelles and sometimes as that of St Zachary. These facts were of course not what the enquirer really sought. His had been an oblique request for information about the Catholic retrospect on Gunpowder Plot. A full, probably an exhaustive answer to this demand has been given by Father Anstruther in his monograph The Voux of Harrowden.

Beginning with the fifteenth-century Northamptonshire lawyers, father and six sons who all married money, Father Anstruther follows the history of the Vaux family and their collaterals the Treshams, through prosperity to affluence; through knighthood to baronage; through recusancy to ruin; through martyrdom to 1829 and the re-establishment of their title in 1835’ . . . .

That the family survived the Armageddon of the Popish plot is, says Father Anstruther, partly due to the fact that in Northamptonshire there remained scarcely any Catholics to persecute.
The Meaning of Martyrdom
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

No age in Christian history has gone without the grievous accompaniment of martyrdom. We are not singular in this affliction. And so it seems vain upon its occasion merely to protest as if at some monstrous political anomaly. Should we not rather suspect and seek to uncover the profounder connection between it and the economy of our redemption which was effected upon the Cross?

In this enquiry a natural starting point is afforded by St John’s vision of the Apocalypse. He wrote the record of that vision about the year 96 A.D., when the Emperor Domitian’s systematic oppression of the Christians impended. They were a prey to the deepest discouragement. They had already undergone the capricious cruelty of Nero’s persecution. Was there to be no end to their suffering? They must call Domitian, now, Lord and God; this would be the test of their civic loyalty, and it would be a loyalty enforced at the point of the sword. Less and less did it seem possible for the elect to live at peace with the world. St John’s vision brought them the answer. He saw all time stretched over age upon age of persecution and struggle; but he saw simultaneously the same ages gathered in a single syllable of time, made over to victory in the blood of the Lamb. Through the ages Satan, the great dragon—cast down to earth where alone his power remains unloosed—persecuted the Woman whose children are the brethren of Christ. Deprived of power against her and her Firstborn, he ‘went to make war on the rest of her children, the men who keep God’s commandments, and hold fast to the truth concerning Jesus’. ‘Day and night he stood, accusing them in God’s presence. But because of the Lamb’s blood, and because of the truth to which they bore witness, they triumphed over him, holding their lives cheap till death overtook them.’
Fra Angelico
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

Mr John Pope Hennessy’s recent study on Fra Angelico has already been widely and appreciatively reviewed. Yet it is curious how few of its reviewers seem to have noted the profound originality of his treatment and conclusion.

The volume is in itself an admirable specimen of the Phaidon productions at their best. It would be possible to criticise some of the colour reproductions but we are still at the stage when the majority of colour reproductions are liable to criticism. The photographing is excellent, the selection of details ideal for its purpose. The reproductions are predominant over the text as is so often the case in English Art History publications, yet here this is counter-balanced by Mr Pope-Hennessy’s rare capacity for conciseness. In ninety pages of introduction and of catalogue he describes definitively three previouly unknown yet major Italian painters of the Quattrocento.

One of these may still be described as Fra Angelico, but there is little in common between this Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, ‘Fr Ioannes Petri de Magello iuxta Vichium Optimus Pictor’, and the Angelico popularised by Rio in De l’Art Chrétien. He is a consummately accomplished and professional painter, employed by many patrons, working from carefully considered and balanced schemes, and consistently influenced by the ideals in the Lucula Noctis of his Dominican master Giovanni Dominici. The author of the Lucula Noctis was familiar with the technique of his contemporary Italian humanists and could write as well as they of ‘Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede’, but he rejected so many of their standards of value. To him the art of rhetoric seems over-prized. ‘The beautiful form of the poem is like clothing.
Christian Institutions
Authors: Wegner Arthur
Published: July 2007

In every age, even in the centuries called Christian, believers have had to lament the infidelities of men. That is a grief which concerns, most of all, our own individual souls. But the lawyer and the statesman are concerned with institutions, and with the fact that these institutions have been Christian for centuries and have ceased to be so in our time. Christian lawyers and statesmen should feel a tremendous responsibility for this decline of Christian standards in their own generation. They cannot be consoled by the sort of sophistry which suggests that Christian institutions are impossible; that to talk about them only betrays an external view and an unspiritual outlook; that there may be more genuine Christianity in the souls of a few human beings in a so-called unchristian age than in all those celebrated centuries of Christian culture, and that it is only this true Christianity in some individual souls which really matters.

There is one institution, however, which is so closely connected with the very essence of human personality that nobody should venture to call it external; namely, matrimony. And there have been two fundamental changes in it during the last four or five centuries: one that dates back to the Reformation and one that is a specific development of our own time.
Modes of Thought in Primitive Society
Authors: Lienhardt Godfrey
Published: July 2007

No one who studies savage societies would say, today, that there are modes of thought which are confined to primitive peoples. It is rather that we ourselves have specialised ways of apprehending reality. The contributors to this series may, indeed, have described notions which we do not easily take for granted, but which are commonplace among many peoples without our modern science and technology. But any historical sense of proportion—and our historical thought, our sense of relativities, is among our distinguishing characteristics—reminds us that it is some of our own habits of thought which are newly-formed and uncommon. We stand more or less alone, for example, in not taking witchcraft seriously, or distant kinship; and our indifference in such matters divides us equally from savages, and from those ancient cultures whose civilisation, in other respects, we are proud to inherit.

Further, since the eighteenth century at least, we have been rather disposed to forget that a satisfying representation of reality may be sought in more than one way, that reasoning is not the only way of thinking, that there is a place for meditative and imaginative thought.
Crime and the Supernatural in the Novels of Bernanos
Authors: Beaumont Ernest
Published: July 2007

The posthumously published Un mauvais Rêve, recently translated into English, adds a third murderess to those with whom we have already become acquainted in the novels of Bernanos published in his lifetime. Certain basic features are common to them all. The words of Abbé Donissan to Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan would seem to apply to all three: ‘Vous êtes comme un jouet, vous êtes comme la petite balle d’un enfant, entre les mains de Satan’. They are all victims of demoniacal possession. They are therefore victims in a deeper sense than are the unfortunate persons whom they murder, more or less gratuitously. The murder they commit is but the exterior manifestation of the deep corruption within, a corruption which in each case has its origin in childhood, indeed farther back still, in the blood which they have inherited. ‘Vous n’êtes point devant Dieu coupable de ce meurtre’, says Abbé Donissan to Mouchette, and with the terrible insight that he has acquired in his grim encounter of the preceding night he reveals her vicious antecedents. The ‘communion of sinners’ of which the curé of Ambricourt wrote in his diary is strong and has deep and wide ramifications. When the sham priest of Mégère, Evangéline, is awaiting the train that will presumably decapitate her, the author adds his thoughts to hers and evokes the sin of her mother, in whose false position as a defrocked nun with an illegitimate child and in whose sacerdotal obsession her own aberration had its origin.
Fallible Infelicities
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

It would be interesting to know in what sense the Archbishop of Canterbury used the word ‘propaganda’ in introducing to the public, in his speech to Convocation, the pamphlet Infallible Fallacies as a useful antidote to the ‘intensified propaganda’ of the Catholic Church. This word has almost lost its primary and original sense, and has acquired a loaded and sinister meaning. What it usually signifies today is spreading or bolstering up an idea by suppressing half the truth about it, using false emphasis, suggestion and even direct mis-statement, and especially by employing a technique of making isolated and probably hypothetical instances appear as widely applicable generalisations. Inevitably, when the word is used, it raises in the mind an imaginative picture embodying these associations. It is strange then that His Grace should have used it, without explanation, when speaking officially on the delicate topic of the greatest Church in Christendom and the methods it uses in proclaiming its teaching, and it is still stranger that he should have selected for commendation, as a defence against this teaching, a pamphlet which exhibits, though clearly unconsciously and in ignorance, many of the characteristics of propaganda in this secondary and less reputable sense.
Judgment of Death
Authors: Fairfield Letitia
Published: July 2007

It has for long been a source of disquiet to the public conscience that Great Britain is among the very few western countries which find it necessary to retain the death penalty. This policy is only a continuance of a curious national tradition of ruthlessness about executions, for although England had always made a minimal use of torture, and was a pioneer in prison reform, she retained on her statute books until well into the nineteenth century more capital offences than any other civilised country. For Catholics, teaching on the morality of a death sentence is clear. As Mr Hollis points out in his admirable contribution to Messrs Paget and Silverman’s book, ‘It is certainly the teaching of the Christian religion that life is sacred, that it is God who gives life, and therefore only reasons of absolute necessity could justify the taking of life’. The Church has never condemned capital punishment as such; in practice it connived at or even demanded its use by the secular arm for heresy, sorcery, and other offences, and when the popes held temporal power it was in operation in the papal states. Catholics may, one concludes, support capital punishment if it is necessary. But is it necessary? Are there really circumstances in which the only right thing Christians can do with a fellow-citizen is to break his neck? That is the question which the Royal Commission, which recently reported, was appointed in 1949 to answer.
House or Home
Authors: Wright Lance
Published: July 2007

Even those who are most insistent that architecture is an art will admit that there is a limit to what aesthetics can do to gild distressing human arrangements. The truth of this has been brought home to English people in a painful way by the dilemma of ‘housing’. For perhaps no modern building problem has had so much architectural skill lavished on it. But if its fruits are on the whole more seemly than they were forty years ago, this is on the surface only and cannot hide the fact that the conception— whether it is realised, in an estate or a neighbourhood or a new town—is humanly unsatisfactory. If we enquire why and how this is so, all objections lead back to the intractable defect that there is altogether too much of it. ‘Intractable’ because those who still want houses will explain that so far as they are concerned there is altogether too little.

It is not only monotony to the eye which is complained of—though this is at least an indication that there is something wrong—but the great distances which everyone must walk to get anywhere and the social defects which these distances produce and which are generally described as ‘thinning of the social fabric’. Distances so ‘take it out of’ people that they do less, participate less, see less of one another. And it is perhaps this toll on social life which we are chiefly aware of when we remark the lifelessness of our new localities. They are an aggregation of units which do not add up to a commune.

It is surely clear that no urbanity in the architectural arrangements can make up for defects of this kind; but that the fault must lie, if not with basic requirements, at least with the present mode in which they are supplied.
Anathemata
Authors: Chute Desmond
Published: July 2007

In The Anathemata (Faber and Faber; 25s.) Mr David Jones has rewarded admirers of his earlier period—that of opaque paintings, taut images, rare incised or rounded box-woods—by presenting them at length with another major work of sacred art.

Anathemata: ‘things patient of being “set-up to the gods”’: for matter, thoughts stirring as often as not ‘in the time of the Mass’; for background, ‘the entire world of sign and sacrament’; for magnet and focus, the Body of the Lord.

Incarnation is here ‘no hint half guessed, [no] gift half understood’. In lieu of Mr Eliot’s ‘hardly barely prayable prayer’ we have an epic conterminous with recorded and unrecorded time, one vast eucharistic symphony, whose tempo is the velocity of thought; its music ‘unmeasured, irregular in stress and interval, of interior rhythm, modal’, moves stately as in breves, its tone akin rather to woodwind than to strings: ‘reeds then! and minstrelsy’. Great play is made with the more sombre vowels—‘the stone/ the fonted water/ the fronded wood’. Sharps are not to seek—‘if fifth the fire/ the cadence ice’, nor clash of consonants—‘skirted, kilted, cloaked, capped and shod’.
The New Romanticism
Authors: Gregor Ian
Published: July 2007

Those critics who felt uneasy about the nature of Mr Graham Greene’s achievement in The End of the Affair will not be reassured by his first excursion into drama. The Living Room raises in a particularly forceful way a problem that has always been attendant on his work—that of finding what Mr Eliot has termed a satisfactory objective correlative, or ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked’. The same point might be expressed by saying that Mr Greene’s work tends to lack artistic inevitability, so that the tale tends either to be arbitrarily controlled by the informing theological interest, or it is quite inadequate to convey the complexity of that interest. In Brighton Rock, for instance, the narrative pattern is obviously incapable of carrying the deeper meanings of the tale the distinction between good and evil and right and wrong, with which the novel is so much concerned, cannot be said to arise organically from the characters of Pinkie and Ida Arnold. The consequent effect on the reader is the reverse of the novelist’s presumed intention—the theological interest giving the impression of being a device enabling the author to heighten and sustain the emotional pitch of his ‘thriller’. Neither The Heart of the Matter nor The End of the Affair seem to be free from this criticism, in spite of their obviously greater range and maturity. Only in The Power and the Glory does the theological interest seem entirely organic, where the central character, a priest, combines in his own person the conflicting themes of fallen man and the operation of sanctifying grace.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Can there ever be such a thing as having a vocation to choose the wrong vocation? A man adopts a career only to discover too late that it is the wrong career; marries a woman only to find too late that she is the wrong woman; settles down into a fixed, narrow groove only to find that at heart he is a wanderer. Perhaps we should see these errors of judgment as being no more than permitted by God; what is certain is that, the false situation once established, the frustration set up, the sufferer must surely see his vocation as being not at an end but at a beginning: something of value has to be made somehow out of the muddle.

There are of course many other types of frustration, and they are tragically common. There is the outwardly successful marriage which in reality has become empty of meaning: the husband and wife continuing—for the sake of appearances, or from a sense of duty, or because of the children— to act as a happy couple while in reality there is no longer any real communion between them or any hope of any. There are the men and women who long for married life but never achieve it. There are those who have a deep desire to become this or that, to achieve this or that, but have in the end to admit that they lack the necessary gifts. There are those who long for friends, for companionship, but are condemned to loneliness; there are those who never seem to be able to make a real success of anything to which they put their hands. In the moral sphere there are those who long to make something worthy of their lives but who feel hopelessly defeated by some vice which they lack the strength to conquer; there are the cases of undeveloped conscience or deep character defect where a vague desire to ‘be good’ is at times of emotional exaltation raised to grandiose heights of resolution only to be dashed again into the depths of despair when the next defeat occurs.
The Communist's Confession
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The little story that follows has something in common with Guareschi’s Don Camillo tales, but it has the advantage of being true; and truth is more interesting than fiction even when the latter is written by a humorist of genius. My true story is not funny, but most Italian priests who know communism at close quarters do not—sometimes for different reasons—find the situation at all funny, and are even inclined to blame Guareschi for having, as one of them said to me, ‘joked about things that are tragic’. That may not be quite fair to Guareschi, but it is a point of view which his non-Italian admirers should not overlook.

As for my story, its setting is the Tuscan countryside today, where three-quarters of the population are communist and therefore officially excommunicated by the Church. That is the first point to grasp. Try to imagine the more obvious difficulties confronting a priest in this situation. Is he to refuse the Sacraments to everyone who has the party membership card and will not throw it away? If so, he knows that he is shutting the church door in the face of most of the men in his parish and more than half the women. Over large zones of central Italy the peasants just assume, as a thing too obvious to need discussion, that the communist party is their party. E il nostro partito: the phrase comes out pat as a matter of course. Moreover it is widely assumed in Italy (at least verbally) that communism is simply Christianity in practice, and that the priests at the bottom of their hearts know this. In other words it is assumed that the barrier between Church and communism is no more than a legal device erected by the priests because their self-interest ties them to the other political faction.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Few confusions are more common, or more perplexing, today than the confusion between two quite different uses of the word ‘natural’; yet both uses are valid enough if rightly understood; and the distinction between them is a very simple one.

On the one hand, we are always saying, or hearing it said, that this or that action, though not commendable, is ‘natural enough’ or ‘only natural’. It is only natural for people to lose their tempers or their heads sometimes, only natural if occasionally they oversleep or overeat, only natural if sometimes they let this or that passion get the better of them. What does the phrase mean? It means, in effect, ‘only to be expected’. And why is it to be expected? Because that, to use another common phrase, is ‘only human nature’ as we know it. But what is the human nature that we know in everyday experience? It is, in the language of Catholic theology, fallen human nature.

Fallen human nature means human nature, not as it was created by God, not as it was intended to be by God, but as it exists now, warped and twisted by evil. It is not wholly evil, far from it; but the evil tendencies are there, as we all know from our own experience; in our better moments we realize that we ought to be conquering them, integrating the energies which find an outlet in evil actions into the organic unity of the good life; but again and again we fail, or we forget altogether even to try, and then nature-as-we-know-it has its way.