bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Economics and Social Progress
Authors: MacLaren Drostan
Published: July 2007

Though the nature, characteristics and consequences of the economic system we call ‘capitalism’ are so well known as to be taken for granted, yet when we try to frame a definition of the system it is not at all easy. There exists a multitude of definitions of capitalism: the fact that many of these are incomplete or else falsified by subjective interpretations adds to the general confusion.

To begin with, we can say that capitalism is a system; that is to say, it is the realisation in the factual order of an economic doctrine. There is a considerable amount of evidence, both in theory and practice, in support of the position which maintains that the economic doctrine enshrined in capitalism has two essential characteristics. It is based upon private ownership of the means of production and of the goods produced: its raison d’etre, its end or objective, is profit.

This second element—the accumulation of money for its own sake as the sole objective—immediately puts capitalism in conflict with Christian moral teaching. Attempts have been made to explain away this opposition by attributing it to moral failings in individuals by saying it is the capitalist spirit and not capitalism itself which is bad. There will always be individuals who sin against God and against their neighbour by the sin of avarice: these individuals flourish in any economic regime: capitalism is good in itself and must not be blamed for their existence. Such an attitude is completely shattered by Horvath in his famous book on property.
Private Property and the Distributist Thesis
Authors: Jebb Reginald
Published: July 2007

The central tenet of the distributist thesis is a wide-spread diffusion of private ownership, and perhaps our first task should be to show that property privately owned accords with the precepts of natural law. Possession of material things is a right of man, because, being created with reason and will, he is to that extent master of the material world, and the natural destiny of the latter is to serve his needs. But possession does not necessarily imply private ownership. There are, for example, communal forms of ownership. The right of individuals to possess private property is not therefore an absolute precept of natural law. But both reason and experience prove that communal ownership, as a general mode of human possession, is unsatisfactory. Aristotle calls it an occasion of strife, and it is almost inconceivable that, with human beings as they are, such a system generally applied could fail to cause constant quarrelling, interfere grievously with primary production, and weaken the bonds that unite the family.

Private ownership, provided it be equitably distributed and does not claim excessive powers, has none of these defects. Moreover the whole trend of the Church’s teaching, especially in the famous encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as in several allocutions of the present Pope, has been in its favour.

But from the starting point of wide-spread private property Distributism enters a field that comprises politics, economy, and human relationships. In this era of finance-industrialism it is revolutionary in its aims. It is in open and unique opposition to the prevalent trends of modern life.
Capitalism in Canada
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

On 4th February of this year a remarkable joint pastoral letter was published in Quebec, signed by all the bishops of the Province of Quebec, with the title The Workers’ Problem in the light ofthe Social Teaching of the Church. Second only to the United States, Canada has prospered from the application of liberal capitalism to an expanding economy. The encylical is the more remarkable in that in some respects it is an indictment of liberal capitalism. As such it was interpreted and has provoked a number of reactions from big business. It has been understood as support for the stand taken by Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal and Bishop Desranleau of Sherbrooke in the ‘asbestos strike’ of last year. Moreover it foreshadows a period of increasing strife between the Church in the Province of Quebec and the forces of capitalism which are allied with a corrupt though soidisant Christian government.

At the outset the bishops state quite bluntly that, though their country has been endowed by Providence with greater wealth than most parts of the world, there are many areas and professions where the pay is insufficient. In fact, the national wealth is far from equitably distributed and the economic system does not provide ‘for all the members of society in a stable way the material conditions that they need for their spiritual and cultural development’. This latter was declared by Pope Pius XII in 1948 to be me purpose of an economic system. Further than that, the fundamental problem of the worker in Canada has not been solved: economic and social security for himself and for his family.
Making Capital in Communist China
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

For the best part of this century, the exploitation of the East by the West has been a favourite theme with pamphleteers; and as the sincerity of the pamphleteers has grown, so has the interest of the public declined. The subject, it is argued, has been flogged to death and, taking an Epicurean stand, Englishmen have added—let sleeping dogs lie. In the common mind China appears a far distant continent—another world.

The attitude is typical of Englishmen as a whole, but it is also typical of many Europeans. In America the orientation is different, because Chinese emigrés make up a considerable part of the population of the United States. Often enough Hollywood may depict the Chinaman as either a pirate or opium eater, but to the American he is a person of distinct characteristics; he may run a successful chop-suey restaurant in Greenwich Village or he may be an astute lawyer. They are not deluded by the romantic notion of film directors that he is a man capable of saying little else other than ‘Me muchee-muchee sad’. They are well aware that he may as yet prove a powerful business rival, although his methods of business will not necessarily be those of the American businessman. For part of Congress’s dilemma over recognising the ‘People’s Republic of China’ is a fear of admitting to a certain national failure. The Americans, despite their vast propaganda machine, have failed to impress the Chinese with their way of life; the Chinese have remained impervious, philosophically isolationist.
Ortega and Religion
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

Ortega as a philosopher has met with opposition from some Catholic circles within the Spanish-speaking world because he not only has apparently forsaken his own Catholic tradition but has ignored religion in his own philosophical scheme. If at most he can be said to have left a place for it, the place is so far unoccupied. It is true that very early in his career Ortega gave up the practice of religion and that at no time has religion in any pietistic way interested him as a topic. It is also true that he has always treated it with respect and he includes the religious sense as one of the five elements in his theory of values. (The others are goodness, beauty, truth and justice.)

This neglect, however, is only superficial and accidental. Ortega’s thought is really profoundly religious and one is inclined to classify him as possessing the truly religious temperament of the artist as against the intellectual or mystic. Indeed, one of the difficulties about Ortega’s philosophy all through is that it is a very subtle system of thought, closely articulated, but mediated through a highly aesthetic temperament. Ortega’s philosophical aim is so fundamental that it is unlikely that he himself will ever arrive at the point of sketching the natural theology proper to it. His object is to change radically the whole approach to knowledge and being by starting from the individual experience of living and, instead of projecting concepts upon, as it were, the screen of the intellect, work to truth within that experience.
Simone Weil, God's Servant
Authors: Nicholl Donald
Published: July 2007

There were giants in those days’. It was in reference to the I past generation of Catholic writers that the remark was made, to the generation of Chesterton, Gill, Belloc and Baring, all those whose brilliance and wit led to talk of a Catholic revival in fashionable circles. How many of them were really giants might be questioned; but it is beyond question that a lesser breed followed in their wake, whose clever caperings and ‘told-you-so’ attitude did little credit to anyone, least of all to the ‘giants’ and the cause they served. Nor has the cause been better served by that superficial reading of the ‘giants’ which induced ill-founded reveries of an ‘age of faith’ and readily identified Christianity with dead cultures.

And the most poisonous effect of this fashionable nostalgia has been to leave a whole generation of young people thinking of themselves as inhabiting a world of winter which they can only hope will somehow turn again into a medieval summer. It will not. For despite the gloomy predictions and pessimistic determinism of the swelling band of prophet-historians, this wintry world is the one we have to live in, and, under God, it is we who must alter it. Furthermore, if only we were not so blind, if only we would take our eyes away from the past and look at the world in which we are living, we should see the summer, here already, shining in countless heroic lives. There are giants in these days. It is true, they are not given to poetry and belles-lettres, these giants of our day; they are a silent race, as becomes those who remember Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Where are they to be found? Many of them in monasteries, returning to God his choicest gifts, even the gift of speech; some live in Eastern Europe; others, perhaps, sell Catholic papers outside Lyons Corner House on dreary Saturday nights.
Travelling to Some Purpose
Authors: Walker Peregrine
Published: July 2007

When you close the door behind you and start on a journey, something important begins to happen. You are making an act of faith in mankind. And if that seems too pompous a description, then at least let it be conceded that any journey is a trip to the unknown. The elaborately equipped explorer, setting out for Antarctic wastes or Himalayan mountains, is, we admit, asking for adventure, and we marvel at his news from nowhere when he returns. But the more modest wanderings of most of us—whether to the Pyrenees or the Italian lakes, or, for that matter, along the coast-line of Sussex or into the Shropshire hills: there seems little here for wonder. A stolen passport, a puncture, losing one’s way, whether on a map or on an unfamiliar menu—this is the small price we may have to pay for abandoning the safety of the holiday-camp or the boarding-house lounge on the front.

And yet the most staid of journeys is always more than it seems, for it is a human thing to do: with possibilities, therefore, which we can never guess at in advance. The most domesticated dog is incapable of travel: he is moved by the necessity of food and the demands of his kind. He is quite incapable of arriving, early or late. For travel is always a choice: something to be begun, and, let us hope, to be safely ended; but to be interrupted and altered, too. And it involves other people. However solitary a traveller may think himself to be, however silent he may stand on a peak in Darien, the point of his wonder, the purpose of his journey, is always in the end linked up with his freedom. He might have stayed at home, he might have crossed the mountains by another pass. And all would have been different.
Ruins and Revival
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

These were men of mercy whose godly deeds have not failed. Ecclus. 44, 10.

There are still a great many people in England today who regard Catholics as strange and even sinister folk who worship with strange rites in a foreign tongue, render allegiance to the Pope of Rome and have a notable reverence for the Mother of Christ. Yet four hundred years ago there was scarcely a man, woman or child in England who did not accept these rites and this allegiance and this reverence as part of their daily lives, as had their forefathers for many centuries before them. Gathered around this temporary altar, to be present once again at the eternal sacrifice of Calvary within these ruins of a once magnificent abbey, our minds and imaginations inevitably take us back to those days of Catholic England when the great abbey church of St Mary at Hayles resounded by day and night to the prayers of the Cistercian monks who had dedicated their lives here to the service of God and of their fellow-men.

Nearly nine hundred years ago Hayles Manor came into the possession of one William Leuric of whom it is recorded that he freed twelve serfs here. In 1246 Richard, Earl of Cornwall, founded the Abbey of St Mary at Hayles in fulfilment of a vow made on escaping from shipwreck. A few years later his son presented to the abbey church the venerated relic known as ‘the Holy Blood of Hayles’, contained in a crystal phial and believed to contain some of the blood shed by our Redeemer on Calvary, which, until it was ruthlessly destroyed by Cromwell’s agents at the destruction of the monastery, was the venerated object of pilgrimage for countless devout men and women both from this country and from over the seas.
A Century of Catholic Intellectual Life
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

Obviously enough a short article on the history of Catholic thought in England in the last hundred years can only suggest a few thoughts of a general nature, for a mere date list without detailed historical interpretation would be useless, and several volumes would be needed for the latter task. A hundred years ago Catholic thought in England was broadening under the influence of Wiseman and Newman. It is, however, a mistake to think that they created it, for behind them lies the solid historical and spiritual interests of the priests of the penal days: strong controversialists, such as Milner, historians of the type of Lingard, and writers like Butler and Challoner, were all massively English in their virtues and prejudices. Their thought was unspeculative, concrete, and strongly, though not deeply, based on the Latin Fathers.

With Wiseman and Newman, new influences were brought to bear which served to constitute the pattern of Catholic thought for the next fifty years. Wiseman with his generous, though somewhat undisciplined, imagination brought Catholic England into contact with the thought of the Munich circle and of the French Liberal school. For Wiseman these movements involved a vision of the restoration of the faith, but a glance at Ward’s Life makes it clear that his hopes rested on an inadequate intellectual synthesis, in that it was too strongly influenced by theological Traditionalism and implied a naive view of Liberalism. It was, in short, a Catholic variety of the early nineteenth century theologies of feeling. This statement serves to stress the interesting, though often forgotten, fact that the thinkers of the Catholic Restoration knew little of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages, and what they did see they tended to misunderstand as they saw it reflected in the blurred mirror of Romanticism.
‘A Great Idea Extinct’
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which paved the way for the re-establishment of the Hierarchy twenty-one years later, brought no relief to the Religious Orders of men. Indeed it considerably increased the disabilities to which they had been so long subjected. Referring to Jesuits and members of other Orders, the Act states that ‘it is expedient to make provision for the gradual suppression and final prohibition of the same’. It goes on to enact that every member of such an order actually in England must register with the local clerk of the peace within six months, under penalty of £50 for each month of unregistered residence. Any member landing in England thereafter is to be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour and banished for life. It is made an offence, punishable by fme and imprisonment, to receive the vows of Religious in England or Ireland, and the person making vows is liable to banishment for life. An attempt to repeal these clauses was made in 1846, but without success. It is difficult to realise that when the Oxford Movement was in full flood the great Religious Orders were outlawed and doomed to extinction.

Time was to show that these vicious laws were still-born and would never be invoked. It is easy to be wise after the event. The years between 1829 and 1850 that achieved so much for the Church were, for the Religious, a time of grave anxiety and uncertainty. Their strength lay in their schools. It was only here that they could attempt any degree of community life, and it was from their schools that they hoped to draw recruits. The French Revolution had driven to England the schools that had for so long rendered distinguished service beyond the seas. Long before Emancipation the Benedictines were firmly established at Ample-forth and Downside.
Mr Dawson and Christendom
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Among the historians of Christian culture alive today, two stand out with particular distinction: M. Etienne Gilson and Mr Christopher Dawson. They are both prolific writers, and neither is always equal to his own standard; but their best work is of a very high quality indeed. These qualities differ, however, and it is interesting to compare diem. Both men are scholars through and through, and both possess to a very unusual degree the real historian’s gift of generalising from particular data. But their points of view differ, and their data. M. Gilson is a connoisseur of ideas; of other men’s ideas, in studying which he discovers his own. He knows much about many human minds, precisely in so far as these minds have become articulate in conceptual thought, and expresses this thought in words and writing. An expert in philosophies, he is scrupulously careful to respect his documentary data; but he wrings all he can out of it. For he makes it his business to discern and define what is individual and original in each thinker he studies; to study therefore each case in and for itself before passing on to another one. Then, having so treated a number of cases, he pauses to consider interconnections; and so draws up patterns of intellectual transmission and differentiation. All his work is a study of minds in their expressed ideas; with a view, first, to discovering originality and then to tracing derivations.

Mr Dawson’s very different work is harder to characterise. His range is of course wider, materially, but it is less abstract. He is called a philosopher of history, but he is hardly a historian of philosophy. Though his work teems with individual testimonies he never, or scarcely ever, pauses long to consider an individual.
One Way Home
Authors: Leigh Margaret
Published: July 2007

‘Laetati sumus pro diebus, quibus nos humiliasti, annis quibus vidimas mala.’ (Ps. 89.)

There are as many roads to Rome as there are travellers. Each one’s experience is different, so that the record of each journey has a unique value. I was a girl of eighteen when the Church first attracted me, and a woman of fifty-four when I was finally received. What follows is the story of a long, bitter and unavailing struggle against the endless patience of God.

I was the only child of an Oxford don who died young, and was brought up in the traditional beauty of an ancient university town. My mother was a devout High Anglican, but very tolerant: religion was never forced on me, and as a child I took little or no interest in it. At seventeen I read a little Plato at school, and thus discovered a new world of spiritual values. In this way, helped by my mother’s influence, and probably impelled also by some hidden process of inward conversion, I was drawn towards the religion which had hitherto been to me mere words and conventional churchgoing. I began to go to church of my own will, and to read the gospels, The Imitation of Christ, a book of selections from the German mystics, Dante, and St Augustine’s Confessions. There also developed a profound interest in the contemplative life, which persisted, sometimes consciously, but more often in secret, through all the years of my infidelity, working like a recurrent fever in the system. At this time I seriously thought of becoming a Catholic, and was encouraged by my mother, who, like so many Anglicans, had a great admiration for Rome, combined with an intensely patriotic attachment to her national church. I had also a secret desire, which I kept to myself, of eventually joining one of the Contemplative Orders.
The Collapse of a Civilsation
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

Shortly after the year 400 the poet Prudentius wrote that the Roman Empire had never been more flourishing nor so happy. All the evidence that we possess tends to show that it seemed eternal and impregnable to its citizens. It was impossible for them to conceive of their life without it. The Western provinces formed a single, carefully administered state, covering modern England, France, the Netherlands, Western Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, North Africa, and part of the Balkans. All were joined by a common culture, a common way of life, the common use of Latin. There were close economic links with the Eastern provinces of the Empire grouped round the other end of the Mediterranean. Here, Greek was the common language instead of Latin and great cities like Antioch and Alexandria had come to play roles paralleled today by New York and Chicago.

In the year 400, the young Emperor in the East was brother to the Emperor of the West and was thought of as his partner in a single sovereignty. The partnership seemed indissoluble. In the words of the greatest of fourth-century poets, ‘All Roman subjects were citizens of a single city, children round a single hearth’. The Roman way of life was prized as the common heritage of all free men. During the last forty years there had been a great increase in legislation in the West. For the most part, it had been enlightened and progressive and it regulated to the smallest detail the activities of every citizen.
Recent Work on the Mass
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

The modern liturgical movement has taken many years to find its dogmatic and really deep spiritual basis. It has received its confirmation in this regard from the two great Papal Encyclicals, Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei; while the whole movement has depended upon, as well as influenced, the abandonment of the post-reformation, literal explanation of the Sacrifice of the Mass and on the return to the priestly and sacramental understanding of it. This conversion of the theologians, the effects of which are now reaching the ordinary Catholic, is due in the first place to Père de la Taille, S.J., whose heavily documented Mysterium Fidei exploded like some doctrinal atom bomb just after the 1914-18 war. It is a happy coincidence that the second volume of the English translation of this revolutionising work should have just appeared,! for it deals with the Church’s sacrifice as offered by the priest at Mass and united with the unique act of Calvary. Although Père de la Taille did not fully escape from the unreal terminology of the post-reformation disputes he sets forth in this volume the principles which in fact underlie the point of view of the outstanding modem writers on the Eucharist such as Abbot Vonier or Dom Casel. His clear distinction between immolation and oblation has been regarded as his special contribution to the development of Eucharistic doctrine; yet the approach here is still the over-literal one which considers only the present sacrifice here on the altar and fails to appreciate the full significance of a sacramental sacrifice. It was easy to dispose of those almost crude theories of the ‘mystic sword’ which would slay Christ once again did he not remain impassible, but it was not such a straightforward task to escape being involved in the mechanics of the Mass as though it had to fulfil some man-made definition of a sacrifice.
Juvenile Deliquency: Cause and Cure
Authors: Fairfield Letitia
Published: July 2007

This subject is often discussed as though it were a peculiarly I modern problem, and one to which a complete solution .A. should be found. It is of course neither of these things, but a permanent factor to be reckoned with in the up-bringing of the young. It is surprising, however, that only of recent years was separate provision made for child criminals, though one would have thought that their immaturity of mind and body cried aloud for recognition in any Christian community. In the eighteenth century a child of eight was hanged for arson, and there is a spot in Holbom I never pass without a shudder, for here a poor waif of twelve, convicted of many robberies, was literally dragged to the gallows screaming pitifully for mercy. At the end of the last century little children were still being committed to adult prisons, where they were subjected to unwholesome extremes of petting and harshness. Separate courts for children and a more suitable range of punishments, including probation, began under the inspiration of a group of Quakers in Birmingham in 1850. In 1908 appeared the Children’s Act, which has been most unjustly represented as a gratuitous attack on parental rights, but was in fact an essential instrument for the protection of children from gross ill-treatment and abuses for which the common law gave no remedy. A new era of humane and constructive approaches to the delinquencies of youth had begun.

Forty years later, when a revised and much more generous Children’s Act became law, some 40,707 boys and 3,770 girls under seventeen were convicted of indictable offences, and 27,435 youngsters of non-indictable offences. Very disappointingly, this represented a rise amounting to 26% over the previous year (1947) in those between eight and fourteen years and of 23% in those between fourteen and seventeen. When all the obvious war-time excuses have been made the figures for boys are too high to be contemplated with complacency.
The Treatment of Young Offenders
Authors: Page Leo
Published: July 2007

Within the limits of a short paper it is possible to deal with no more than a single aspect of juvenile delinquency, if one makes an effort beyond mere generalities. I propose to say something about the punishment of young offenders after their conviction in the criminal courts. To justify and to explain what I say on this matter I shall assume therefore the truth of two statements: the first, that the amount of crime committed by young people to be very serious, and the second that the character of their offences is often very grave.

I am by no means one of those who takes the view that the young offender is almost always the victim of circumstance, for whom punishment in die old-fashioned sense of the word is either useless, unjust, or inappropriate. Nevertheless, the most modest experience of the juvenile courts teaches one immediate lesson. It is that delinquents vary so widely in intelligence, as also in material circumstances, that in any decision as to the selection of punishment a court must consider carefully every individual offender. This is a matter not of sentiment or of mercy but of the plainest expediency. If this rule is disregarded, real efficiency of a bench is impossible. It is quite impossible for a court either to do real justice or to get the best results if it measures out punishments by rule-of-thumb methods. Two defendants may have committed precisely similar wrongful acts, but it may well be wholly unjust and absurd to award them the same penalty. I labour this point advisedly because it is the basic principle upon which rests the wise administration of criminal law. Again I emphasise that to accept this principle does not mean in the least that one rejects all severe and painful punishment as necessarily wrong. It means only that an instructed judge regards all punishment as a form of treatment.
The Sinner Who Looks Like a Saint
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Le pécheur est au cœur même de la chrétienté... .‘The sinner J J stands at the very heart of Christendom. No one is more competent than he to say what it all means—no one unless it be the saint.’ These words of Péguy might form a text for a great many contemporary Catholic novels: you think not only of Greene, but of Waugh too, of Mauriac. And as you follow the unfolding drama of the lives created by them you sometimes find that in the end the sinner comes to look suspiciously like a saint. Are the novelists justified? Can the sinner be a saint?

We shall perhaps find an answer if, to begin with, we examine Peguy’s words more closely. Why is the sinner the central figure? Why is he more competent than others to say what Christianity is about? Because Christianity is the religion of redemption, of rescue, of mercy, of the tenderness of God: because Christianity means the coming of light from darkness, of life from death: the dry bones live again. And it is the sorrowing sinner who knows this process, knows it in his heart, far more than the ninety-nine who need not penance: it is the sinner who knows the need of a Saviour by more than hearsay: it is the sinner who knows the grace of God not as an empty term in a textbook or a sermon but as a reality longed for, fled from, gained and lost again, known as a blinded man knows light and colour.

Clearly we are using the word sinner, when we speak thus, in a special sense. Mary, who was a sinner in the city, Peter, who denied, out of cowardice, the Christ he loved, all the millions of human beings who fail from weakness to keep the law of God: yes, you can call them sinners, but they are sinners in a very different sense from those who deliberately turn their love into hate, who coldly deride God and his law, who blandly ignore the reality they have once known.
Eric Gill: A Retrospect
Authors: Chute Desmond
Published: July 2007

I wonder how many people have spent five minutes today thinking about the Incarnation.’ The speaker was Father Vincent McNabb. It was during the first world war and the Rosary had just been said in the Gills’ living-room kitchen on Ditchling Common. In default of a chapel, Compline was sung nightly in this long low candle-lit room. At one end two candles burned beside a crucifix on the mantel-shelf, at the other a stone niche flush with the whitewashed wall enshrined a small figure of Our Lady suckling the Divine Child; lights and shadows flickered around their feet from a wick floating in a bowl hollowed out of the same stone. Between these two focal points of light, members of the families and of the workshops, guests and friends, stood on either side of the refectory table so as to form two choirs. Eric acted as cantor or maybe one of the girls; more often Betty whose voice was as plumb in the middle of the note, as English-sweet as her father’s.

Later on, Compline came to be chanted in one of the new workshops and finally in the Guild Chapel. But neither the shadowy resonance of the lofty shop nor the quietude of the white chapel ever recaptured quite the same spontaneity of intimate absorption in the Church s twilight prayer as transfigured nightly that cottage kitchen.

Hopkins’ Crank was at that time a neat square toy of a house on the western fringe of the Common, an untouched Georgian squatter’s cottage, preceded by a porch and diminutive fenced garden. Here amid sweet william, honesty and marigolds there grew two rose-bushes of the kind which, on stems furry with prickles, bears amid many deep-grooved leaves large flat single blooms, white or magenta.
Colour‐Bar in the West Indies
Authors: Devas Raymund
Published: July 2007

But let the reader be sure to notice at the outset that it is of the southern half of the West Indies that I can speak with experience. There are so many islands in the whole chain, extending as it does for a thousand miles and more; and, whereas all resemble one another in some respects, in other ways they can be, and are, astonishingly different. Naturally, therefore, one should only dogmatise about those of which one has first-hand knowledge. The islands I know are Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados, and (omitting the French islands) the Windward group, which now includes Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and Dominica.

One of the charms of the Colony of Grenada is that, full of coloured people as it happens to be, there is no colour-bar. I use the word charm, because it is the reverse of charming when in company with a cultured coloured man to be obliged to halt and reflect We may not enter here. It must be admitted, I suppose, that in this matter, at least among the English islands, Grenada is at the moment unique. Not for very long, however, can it remain unique, because in the West Indies the colour-bar does appear to be breaking down: very slowly in some places, but surely. And this is not a question of what one would like, or of what one hopes for, but of the inevitable development of these islands, which are still colonies but which, as all the world knows, are aspiring to federation and even finally dominion status. As an aside, I may remark that highly exclusive hotels have found it impossible to keep their doors closed against delegates from the Governments of other islands who happened to be coloured men.
Catholics and the Novel
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

Like a well-used hackney-coach, the stricture that in all spheres critical standards are declining is beginning to creak: it is a commonplace in everyday criticism whose place is so common that like other similar phrases—‘learning for its own sake’ and ‘the cultures of freedom loving peoples’—it is a statement which now employed seems all but empty of content. Narrowing the stricture here to the treatment meted out to the novel, one is forced to the conclusion by the standard of current criticism exhibited in fiction-reviewing that the decline is one caused principally by ignorance: ignorance about the purpose of a novel and the history of the novel. This charge which is general must regrettably include much of the Catholic press, where the confusion only becomes greater by the haphazard use of the term ‘Catholic novel’. For this reason therefore in the present essay an attempt will be made first to trace the emergence of the novel in English fiction and, secondly, to see how in this larger context what is termed the ‘Catholic novel’ came into being. Finally the actual term ‘Catholic novel’ will be examined.

A novel is a large diffused picture comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan. . . . This plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.—Smollett.
Hampshire House Workshops
Authors: Pepler H. D. C.
Published: July 2007

During the nineteenth century the Christian conscience, what was left of it, had become increasingly uneasy by the sight of great poverty and great wealth existing side by side, by the problems presented in the fast growing industrial areas, by the sense that the poor had been dispossessed and that some form of restitution was due to them. John Buskin preached, William Morris practised, one or two rich young men took our Lord at his word and sold all that they had, many of the well-to-do gave much of their time and energy in ‘Social Service’, and men of good will supported charitable works according to their means. The ‘gay nineties’ saw the opening of many clubs for working men in poor parishes, the universities had their settlements or missions, and the late Canon Bartlett founded Toynbee Hall (Whitechapel) with a well planned educational objective. The normal cleavage of society into rich and poor had not then been recognised as constituting two distinct classes —employer and employed—with differing responsibilities to the State; that fateful distinction of status only reached the statute book with the passing of the insurance Act.
The Origins of Dominican Chant
Authors: Wellesz E. J.
Published: July 2007

The modern printed editions of the Dominican Chant which, as is well known, differ widely from those of the Roman rite, preserve accurately the text of the Correctorium of Fr Humbert de Romans, who undertook the work at the instigation of the General Chapter of the Order held at Buda in 1254. When at the beginning of the twentieth century the reform of Gregorian Chant was introduced attention was drawn also to the origins of the Dominican version of Plainchant. P. Wagner, the first musicologist to investigate the problem, discovered that remarkable similarities existed between the Dominican and Cistercian tradition of Plain-chant, as can be seen from his Neumenkunde (second edition, 1912, pp. 471 sqq.). But he considered that it was impossible to find out whether Humbert took the Cistercian Chant as a model or whether both versions were derived from a common source; namely the theory of chant used in Paris at that time. No progress has been made in solving this question since the publication of Peter Wagner’s book. Now, at last, Père Dominique Delalande has taken up the examination of the question on a wide scale. From the comparison of the melodies of the Dominican Gradual with those of the Cistercian he comes to the conclusion that the Dominican Gradual was derived from that of the Cistercians.
The Bible in Pictures
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

Parents are often heard to lament the lack of books capable of explaining the Bible to their children. There is a very obvious lack in this matter among Catholic books, but the deficiency is not restricted to Catholics. There are, of course, a certain number of picture books illustrating the life of Christ or episodes in the Bible, but they are generally prepared on the false assumption that the only sense of Scripture a child can grasp is the literal sense. Herein lies a serious fallacy, for the child’s mind is instinctively symbolic and metaphorical; the poet exists in the young mind long-before the philosopher is born in him, long before he can analyse the meaning of his signs and make-believe. But when an artist tries to give only the literal sense to the child he begins by painting Jews and Arab sheiks as they are said to have been at the time of Christ. He then goes on to apply certain aspects of the universal appeal of Christ to every individual with an almost complete univocity in which our Lord appears not only as a baby but also as a sailor boy and fighter pilot. And since Christ in this respect has to appear as the lowest common denominator among all these types of humanity he has to be robbed pictorially of any definite character. The ‘baby-Jesus’ style of art turns the Word Incarnate into a simpering doll, meant to represent the neighbours’ little Sally aged eighteen months without excluding cousin Tom who is two years older. The holy Child must be no more than an outline of round cheeks and chubby limbs in order to fit into it any child character one chooses.
An Aesthetic Vacuum
Authors: Shirley M.
Published: July 2007

During the autumn two exhibitions appeared in London, which although widely different in stylistic characteristics and historical circumstance, admit an identity of purpose. Careful comparison might prove provocative in that both, although possessing a similar sense of direction, have failed to attain to the same measure of success in the communication of this principle. One of these shows consisted of work by the early Netherlandish painter, Gerard David and two of his followers, while the other, the first to be held at the Ashley Galleries, was confined to examples of church art and smaller devotional pieces by contemporary artists. It could be argued that any critical comparison would be unfair, even fruitless, and viewed superficially this is so. We are here concerned with technical arrangement only in so far as it detracts from, or heightens, the artist’s power to broadcast his message, rather than with a deliberate attempt to try to prove the existence of technical parallels which in fact are not there.

Briefly the issue is whether religious painting can flourish without the endurance of a broader tradition strong enough to support certain weaknesses in the artist’s vision when the grander impetus, such as was found in the major epochs of European art, is dwindling or lost. Mr Wyndham Lewis in a somewhat shallow commentary on the show impatiently dismisses its value on account of David’s lack of notable genius, regarding it as a dismal venture. Looking for corroboration he quotes from M. J. Friedlander’s introduction to the catalogue where he wrote thus, ‘In the history of art David represents the end, the tuneful knell of the fifteenth century in an ageing city (Bruges) ‘.
Psychology and Catholics
Authors: Burns Charles
Published: July 2007

It is obviously impossible in a brief article to discuss the relation between the corpus of Catholic belief, tradition, and their pastoral applications on the one hand, and the enormous mass of half-digested material which is modern psychology, on the other. I have chosen to throw out a few hints as to the kind of problems which agitate the mind of anyone who is concerned with the subject. I am dealing with two terms of a discussion which to many Catholics appear to be irreconcilable.

I hope that those who keep their Blackfriars back-numbers, or can get hold of them, will re-read a long and searching article, by Father Victor White in the number for August 1945 entitled ‘Psychotherapy and Ethics’, for these notes are prompted largely by that essay, and the long interval of time is a measure of its vivid effect upon my thought. I will doubtless appear to have overstressed the difference between us, which is probably far more one of theory than of practice. I may thereby also give some wrong impressions by overstating the case for psychology; this is perhaps inevitable in any debate.

I do however regard the reconciliation and synthesis of religion and psychology as of far greater importance than that between ‘religion and science’ which agitated a previous generation.
The Unity of the Church
Authors: Butler Christopher
Published: July 2007

The question of the reintegration of Christendom has been brought before the public of this country recently by an article and a series of letters in The Times, and before the whole world by the Holy Father’s address on Christmas Eve. I hope that some of the following remarks may help to explain to non-Catholics why it is that we Catholics do not seem to be able to join in whole-heartedly with some of the attempts that are made from time to time to effect that reintegration by a process of corporate reunion of the separated Christian bodies; although we are at least as anxious as any other body to see reunion achieved. And we believe that we hold from God the key to reunion.

There is a homesickness for visible unity in the Christian world today, thank God. The crisis of our civilization, the growth of secularism, the menace of conscious deliberate organized antiChristian forces have no doubt in part occasioned this heightened sense that Christians must unite in face of common perils. And again, the serious disadvantages (to use no stronger language) that attend upon Christian missionary effort, both at home and abroad, through the mutual contradictions and competition of the various Christian communions, are perhaps more vividly realised at present than at most times in the past three hundred years. But surely the driving force of what I may call the reunion movement is something deeper, more native to Christianity as such, than even these grave practical considerations. Surely the dynamism of the movement, or movements, comes from a growing conviction that disunity can only be justified by a virtual denial of something that is of the very essence of Christianity, that it would mean contradicting the intention of God Incarnate. Did he not himself remind us that a kingdom or a house divided against itself cannot stand?
The Substitution of Science for Religion
Authors: Taylor F. Sherwood
Published: July 2007

The first step towards the investigation of the extent to which science has in fact taken and may continue to take the place of religion is to decide the sense in which we are to understand the word science. First, we are to discuss not scientia but ‘natural science’, and this is not a sharply definable conception. Natural science is the knowledge and theories that are obtained by the scientific method. The scientific method starts from observations, verifiable by repetition or, where repetition is not possible, by the making of similar observations. These observations lead by the method of induction to statements about classes of observations, which statements we dignify with the name of laws. These laws may be used as material for the deduction of other laws which are only accepted if verified by their prediction of what experiment confirms.

The observations of science are never wholly accurate (except when they are enumerations), but their degree of error is usually known and so we can arrive at comparatively reliable statements about what has been observed. The inductions made from these observations are of a degree of reliability dependent on the number of observations used and the accuracy with which these are expressed by the generalisation. Some scientific laws, then, make statements which are very unlikely to be appreciably modified, while others are considerably less certain.

The scientific laws are not a disconnected set of rules; they are unified by the theories or suppositions concerning the nature of what science studies. Thus the atomic theory links together hundreds or thousands of laws in physics and chemistry, explains them, and suggests new lines of investigation. These theories are the more likely in proportion as they link together a wider range of laws (and so of observations) and as they are fruitful in leading to new knowledge. Some theories, such as the atomic theory, are practically accepted as fact; others, such as Wegener’s theory of floating continents, as fruitful conjectures.
The Church of England & Catholic Unity
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

My starting point will be some words of Bishop Hensley Henson, written in his Journal during the early stages of the Malines Conversations.

‘In the afternoon I read Pusey’s Life. His essay at negotiating a union with the Roman Church appears to have run the normal course, and experienced the normal fortune. Eager approaches from the Anglican side; non-committal compliments on the Roman; restiveness and reproaches in both camps; extravagant Anglican expectations, and then sharp disillusionment when the Roman authorities finally speak. I cannot doubt that the present essay will repeat the too familiar-history.’

If we discount a certain bias and exaggeration in the writer’s expression of opinion, it can hardly be said that his forecast was not a true one. Bishop Bell’s summing up in his account of the Conversations in Archbishop Davidson’s Life, though sympathetic and optimistic, does not in essentials differ from Bishop Henson’s.

‘Of their effect on the Church as a whole’, he writes, ‘Who can speak? There has been progress in understanding, in charity, in desire. So far as the longed-for rapprochement was concerned, the fundamental difficulties remain unsolved. But channels of thought and methods of study have been started, from which perhaps in later days some great gain may result.’

And now, once again, twenty-two years after the publication of the Malines Report, The Times correspondence of last November, on ‘Catholicism Today’, has revealed on both sides of the dividing line a deeply-felt desire for rapprochement, and a widespread sense that the way to increasing unity of heart and mind lies in the growth of friendly contacts and in conferences, on the theological level, between representatives of the different parts of divided Christendom.