bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Enlisting Revolution II
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

Let us be clear. The vehemence of Conservative reaction to-day is evoked not by this particular -ism or that; nor has it anything to do with objective examination of the remedial theories proposed. Its critical faculties are limited strictly to the apprehension of a radical programme only in so far as it is sufficiently practical, or not, to be feared.

Capitalism reacts, then, to nothing more specific than effective Revolutionary impulse evoked by the exploitation of the masses. And to the effectiveness or probable effectiveness of the impulse, the vigour of Conservative reaction is strictly relative. For the powers of this world deal not in absolute value but effect. Let us suffer no illusion. We do not doubt that were Catholics sufficiently keen and sincere, sufficiently devoted to the leadership of the Pope to be feared in the world politic, the Social encyclicals of Pius XI would be in no time apprehended as heralding a revolution so complete (because so absolute and profoundly moral) that it would in effect surpass the wildest dreams of an oppressed proletariat (and the most fearful nightmares of the pocket-conscious). Once again, as before when it suited the mood and the expedients of the time, the Pope would be dubbed Anti-Christ. The World is ever wont to perceive heresy in its opponents.

We have spoken of dissent among the Elect. Of the alacrity with which the Bien-pensant perceive a heresy. By a diabolical ill-chance—and something more than chance—revolution in nine cases out of ten allies itself to a heresy. But it is our present business to urge that that heresy is not necessarily identifiable with the revolutionary impulse itself.
The Manichen Unreality
Authors: Durkan John
Published: July 2007

Gentile attributes to post-Renaissance literary heresy the familiar form of Manicheanism. Body and soul, the Catholic believes, are married indivorcibly in this life: the historical Manichee emphasizes the soul and neglects the reality of the body. Historically the Manichees regarded marriage as sinful, with the consequence that many came to inflict on themselves sterilization, for that was their doctrine in effect. The outcome was soulfulness and Grundyism, which have permeated life and literature ever since. If Gentile errs in applying the emphasis on soul, it is because he neglects the counter-emphasis on the body. The revolt against post-Reformation Puritanism implicit in D. H. Lawrence is a natural though blind realization of the unreality of the spiritual superman exploited in romantic art. It is to a negative religiosity that Lawrence is merciless in his exposure of Miriam who was always begging things to love her. His own romanticist exploitation of sex is mere primitivism, but the Manichean attitude is evident in the fatalistic way logic is dissociated from the world of fact as when the Manichees ignored marriage in spite of its necessity for human preservation. It is useful, therefore, to take the fundamental Manichean spirit as centred obliviously on either body or soul alone, for either way corrupts human integrity and disturbs the unity where body dovetails with soul.

The soul-emphasis in literature is reflected in modem aestheticism. This is partly due to the critical tendency which refines every line of the poem and partly to the abuse of art as religion.
Carnock, Conference and Curzon
Authors: Foster P. D.
Published: July 2007

Mr. Harold Nicholson has completed his great trilogy, thus concluding his survey of the diplomatic history of Great Britain from approximately the end of ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the death of Lord Curzon. And there has happened to Mr. Nicholson what has happened to other historians; in compiling an account he has unpremeditatedly formulated an indictment. He has focussed his lens delicately upon the clear-cut and aristocratic figure of Diplomacy, but the developed plate has revealed in the background and in the very act of sabotage the hulking and murderous figure of Democracy.

There are many counts upon which to praise Mr. Nicholson. He is an admirer of the modern and obscure method of prose writing, but his own style is limpid and traditional. The Supreme Council overworked him at Paris in 1919 because of his ability in drafting, and we reap the benefit of that ability in his concise précis of situations, protocols, treaties, crises and historic passages, précis which are clear, logical and full, and easier to read than many novels. Most of his historic estimates are not assailable. His narrative of Conferences and correspondences is broken by some of the most brilliant pen-sketches of places and personalities that our generation has produced—the meeting of Edward VII and the Czar at Reval, for instance, the Allied Mission to Bela Kun in 1919, Lord Curzon at Lausanne (a portrait which should be supplemented by his sketch of Arketall in Some People). His epithets and phrases enclose large and precise ideas, his knowledge of Europe and its working make the reading of his volumes almost an education in affairs.
The Catholic Family
Authors: Thistlethwaite B.
Published: July 2007

The present organization of English society is based on the assumption that families include only two or three children apiece. The details of life fit into a consistent scheme which is compatible with the small family, and with no other.

The scheme quite clearly and obviously does not permit of a large family, save as a very exceptional thing. A family of several young children is rarely met with to-day, particularly in the wide-spread middle-classes, and in those classes a natural family of 8, 10 or 12 children is extremely rare. For the large family is compelled to ostracise itself, and to live so differently from persons of its own social status as to excite their curiosity.

It also excites their pity, contempt or reprobation. To bring a number of children into the world is regarded as foolish, improvident, unkind and unjust. It is retrograde, out of harmony with modern progress, a failure to benefit from scientific knowledge, an intensification of the troubles of an already over-populated world, and an act of cruelty to parents and children alike. That is the common verdict, not only of the worldly man and woman, but also of the majority of the most upright, generous, kind-hearted and religious of our neighbours.
Gestant Puellae Viscera
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

Is it He or is it she that most holds the eye, establishing a rhythm of the mind that moves between them? She moves after this night of bearing with the unbroken grace of girlhood. Unprostrate by what to the women of the world is heaviest labour she makes the little adjustments to smooth the harshness of the improvised cradle. Lightness she has, but she has decision also; for to no young mother has the talent of ministry come so readily as to her. It was for this she was made.

A bed from the clean fodder of domestic beasts receives the child. She is delighted to know now her baby is so wholly hers. The flesh she has dexterously cradled in the manger was formed in her under the shadowing of God the Holy Spirit by that same soul which in little vague movements now tentatively becomes expert in the hands. If she by the obvious movements of her ministry first takes the attention, it is herself, her very ministrations, that direct it further downward to the child. She is intent upon Him. He also upon her. The eyes which have not yet learned the little exercise of seeing give back in mirrors the movements of the mother. Palpably He is her son. By the living character of the features already marked in Him He is child of the house of David as is she.

This is her hour of possession. Prophecies crowding upon this moment, futurity weighing from it in its main sway keep the doors of the stable where Mary has given birth to her God.
The Spanish Revolution
Authors: Silva Ramon
Published: July 2007

Jose Maria Salaverrίa, the well-known publicist, writing some months back in the monarchist daily A.B.C., bitterly lamented the lack of tolerance and compromise which characterized Spain’s political life. The reason, he stated, was to be sought in the age-old problem .... what must Spain do to keep up with the march of ‘progress’?.... a problem that has perplexed the greatest minds of the Peninsula and yet remains unsolved. Two solutions have been offered, one the europeizaciόn of Joaquin Costa, a renunciation of the past, a purging of all traditional elements, the double lock on the tomb of the Cid; the other the traditionalism of men like Ramiro de Maeztu whose desire was for a regeneration of his country on the old lines. Here in a nutshell is the tragedy of modern Spain, the struggle of opposites. The modernists have wished the complete elimination of traditional elements as incompatible with ‘progress,’ the traditionalists have viewed innovations with mistrust and have desired to maintain the old Spain without any concession. Other nations, confronted with the same problem, reached a solution through a process of transition, but Spain maintains partisan intransigeance to an extent unknown elsewhere, rendering political life a question of all or nothing, a violent oscillation of the pendulum from extreme to extreme. Political fanaticism of the Right or the Left is equally at fault and breeds nothing but continual alarm, violent polemic, and fruitless struggle. That ‘sweet reasonableness’ which is the essence of democracy is completely lacking.
Catholic Action and Study
Authors: Timmons Anthony
Published: July 2007

A necessity is defined as something that cannot not be; and in approaching Catholic Action study is a necessity. As a recent writer in Blackfriars expressed it: ‘The first stages of Catholic Action tend more to the study than to the street.’

The question which immediately suggests itself is whether there is adequate provision made for the Catholic layman to encourage and help him to ‘get down to’ this study. It is in the belief that there is not, and that some facilities should be forthcoming, that this scheme is suggested. But first let us be satisfied that not enough is being done. There exist two (National) societies for the purpose of promoting study, namely the Catholic Evidence Guild and the Catholic Social Guild. The avowed object of the former is to train apostolic men and women to expound the truths of the Faith from public platforms. This inevitably restricts their numbers, as but few are fitted for such work. The other society’s aim and object is the study and dissemination of Catholic social principles. In the manner of the Schools we feel that we must add a third—a society, or better (in view of Occam’s razor), some organization subject to the various diocesan Catholic Action Boards, whose object would be to provide classes in the fundamentals of the Catholic religion.

The scheme is best outlined under the divisions of the seven ‘circumstances’ of human action:

Who? It will be open to all Catholic laymen who wish to acquire a better knowledge of their Faith, and an intellectual basis for their beliefs.

What? The lectures, twenty-four in all, would be divided into three sections or three terms. The first to deal with natural religion, the second with revealed religion, and the third with the history of the Church.
Church, Stage and Soviet
Authors: Peplep Hilary
Published: July 2007

My interest in the Soviet became active when, after a course in the art of pantomime, one of my pupils was asked to demonstrate my technique for the American section of the M.O.R.T.(which I believe to stand for Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre). It is obvious that the Soviet-minded in New York, ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils exists,’ where also there are so many languages spoken, would like to be acquainted with a wordless drama. We reluctantly decided against the proposal. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I confess to sharing most of the Communist’s views with regard to the existing theatre, and even a few of his ideals for a future stage. I cannot disagree with his condemnation of ‘the revue of the bourgeois theatre distinguished for its extreme banality, absolute absence of political coherence, abundance of triviality, pomposity and out-and-out pornography.’ And not only citizens of U.S.S.R. might endorse the following: ‘The broad masses of workers and peasants, crushed by political and economic oppression, did not know the theatre, and when they did receive some crumbs of scenic art, it was perverted and vulgar . . . Inartistic, in the great majority of cases, and almost always devoid of ideas, offered for sale to the mercantile petty bourgeoisie, under the influence of uncultured impressarios and other business men of ill repute, the ordinary theatre presented a pitiful spectacle.'
Schools of Holiness II
Authors: Steuart R. H. J.
Published: July 2007

The life of St. Francis de Sales—1567-1622, still within the afterglow (or the penumbra) of the Renaissance—covered a very remarkable period in the Church’s history. Luther had been dead twenty-one years and the Counter-Reformation had gathered great strength in the interval, to which St. Francis himself later contributed in no small measure by his amazingly successful missionary excursions into the Savoyan province of Le Chablais. The Council of Trent, which embodied the true principles of reform within the Church, had held its final session four years before he was born, and these principles had been, and were still being, practically exhibited and illustrated by the astonishing galaxy of saints that adorned this new era of her history. The lifetime of St. Francis de Sales was contemporaneous with, or at least overlapped at one end or the other, that of nearly a score of the most illustrious figures in the annals of sanctity. St. Pius V, the Dominican Pope, from whose white habit the now established dress of the Supreme Pontiff derives, reigned over the Church for the first five years of St. Francis’s life. St. Charles Borromeo, St. Philip Neri, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis Borgia were still living during his early youth, as also were the boy saints, Stanislas, Aloysius, and (a little later) John Berchman. Other contemporaries were St. Vincent de Paul, the three Saints Peter (aptly symbolic name for the day!), Canisius, Claver, and Fourier, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, St. John Francis Regis, and St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi.
Wales and the Reformation
Authors: Edwards T. Charles
Published: July 2007

The Reformation in Wales has until recently proved something of an enigma to historians. It was common knowledge that the new doctrines were at first detested by the Welsh, that there was no nucleus of Calvinism, as in England, to give momentum and drive to the Reform movement, nor could there be a sense of antagonism between national prestige and the political expression of continental Catholicism. The English government, no less than the Catholic powers abroad, were fully aware of the possibility of an armed rising in defence of the old religion, though the extent of the danger was a matter of debate. It has been said of the Celts that ‘they went forth to the battle but they always fell.’ In this instance, however, it was precisely in so far as they did not go forth to battle that they fell. Catholicism withered, and the nineteenth century found Wales the home of a type of Protestantism of whose spiritual and literary qualities the poetry of William Williams of Pantycelyn and Ann Griffiths is sufficient evidence.

The historical causes of this religious and cultural revolution remained for a variety of reasons almost unexplored, so far as the general reader is concerned, until the appearance last year of Fr. David Mathew’s book The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe.’ Not only is this a book of considerable penetration and brilliance, but it also supplies a need which is at once new and pressing.
Metaphysics—Or Moods?
Authors: Herring A. G.
Published: July 2007

To read modern lion-catholic philosophy at the present day one would really think that the world was presented to us ‘on approval,’ to such an extent does the conception of Value seem to dominate the discussions. Mr. C. E. M. Joad in the Spectator of October 6th last, remarks that four out of the five specifically philosophical books reviewed by him since the beginning of the year were to do with some theory of ‘Value. Dean Inge notices the fact in his God and the Astronomers, and has a whole chapter on the World of Values; while Windleband says frankly that what is expected from philosophy to-day is not so much a ‘theoretical scheme of the world. . (but) . .reflection on those permanent values which have their foundation in a higher spiritual reality, above the changing interests of the times.'

One would like to know by what authority Philosophy abandons its proper function so as to substitute appreciation for apprehension, and turn Metaphysics into a mood —be it optimistic or pessimistic. We will, however, make some attempt to discover why this strange, non-rational, man-centred change has come over non-catholic thinking.
Art and Leisure
Authors: Drinkwater F. H.
Published: July 2007

When I go to the pictures my object is usually to avoid thought rather than to induce it; but on most occasions it is difficult to escape one reflection at any rate: that there is an inevitable connection between money and art, just as there is between money and religion; and that the connection does not always work out fortunately.

In its dealings with art, the Money Power is just as greedy and unintelligent as with everything else. When a really good picture comes out of Hollywood, as it sometimes does, one feels that the producer has managed to do it. in spite of, not because of, his financial employers. They say that Mr. Montagu Norman has a pretty taste in antiques or old masters or whatever it is, and rumours of striking and original sculpture on the Bank’s new buildings have reached even my Philistine ears. That may be so. Nevertheless, in its relation to culture in general the banking system is more stupid and boorish than the ox that sets his uncaring hoof on the first cluster of primroses. If there are too many cinemas and not enough schools, if living musicians starve and tinned music assails the tortured ear, if villages of bungalows are built on the skyline of the downs, if new slums are being built under pretence of slum clearing, if the English countryside is laid waste by ruthless industrialism-where is the ultimate blame if not on the credit-system which ‘finds the money” for such developments and insists on ‘getting it back’?
Catholics and the National Consciousness
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

The period of the visible expansion of Catholicism in England which began with the Oxford Movement and the Irish Immigration may be considered to have closed with the nineteenth century. Through the converts the Church entered the professional and upper middle-classes, and through the Irish began to leaven the new industrial masses. But tho old English Catholics, though a minority in the Catholic population and despite the many changes introduced by elements foreign to their tradition, possessed the national stubbornness and power of assimilation; they preserved their type, remained the nucleus of the developing and extending temporal life of the revived Church, and largely determined its character. Ullathorne was perhaps the most representative Catholic figure of the period: by the time of his death, the Church was assuming its present form, was already an established institution in the national life, no longer an obscure sect but ranking among the four or five great religious bodies in the country. Since then the effort has been one of consolidation; the various elements in the Church have become more and more unified—partly as the result of time, partly of prudent government; a Catholic middle-class has emerged; internal organization has been perfected—education, the press, religious and cultural institutions; so that now the Church presents the spectacle of a going concern, well-run and secure, somewhat mysterious and exclusive to the outsider, a compact homogeneous body, with every appearance of being well-established, perhaps even entrenched.

But the more excellent a human tradition, the more marked is the tendency to become a privilege and a preserve.
Schools of Holiness
Authors: Steuart K. H. J.
Published: July 2007

The story of St. Teresa of Lisicux must be almost unique in the history of the saints. She was not quite twenty-five years old when she died, on September 30th, 1897, having been a nun for just over nine years, and many who, when she was born, were already older than she was to be when she died, lived to see her name enrolled among the saints. Indeed, her whole history from her birth to her canonization lies well within the lifetime of countless persons now living who would by no means willingly consider themselves old. This, remembering the traditional slowness of the Church in according her official recognition to the heroic sanctity of any individual, would have been remarkable enough had the stage of Teresa's life been set in public view : had she been a path-breaker in some region of active spiritual or social work: or had she been a martyr, an apostle, or a foundress. But her life, as to three fifths of it, was spent entirely within the narrow shelter of a provincial home of the petite bourgeoisie: and as to the remainder, in the virtual obliteration of a Carmelite cloister. Still more remarkable in these circumstances is the fact that canonization may verily be said to have been conferred upon her by publican Lunation even before the Church had set her seal to it. This inversion of the accustomed order of things has happened before, but then the subject of it has always (as one should expect) been one who in lifetime had already taken the public eye—one need go no further back for an example than to the Cure d'Ars or to St. Benedict Joseph Labre.
Emotion and Government
Authors: Haynes Renee
Published: July 2007

All systems of government are ultimately supported upon three bases: the value of property, the value of life and the value of emotion. Oligarchy rests most strongly upon the first, democracy upon the second and dictatorship on the third. The ideal, of course, is an equal distribution of weight: as should theoretically obtain in England, where the Lords stand for land and money, the Commons for the average man, and the King for the old and moving tradition of a living country. But oligarchy is passing: democracy drags out a mechanized existence: young, ardent and austere minds turn to follow with a dedicated loyalty the leadership of a minority or of a man, the proletariat, the dictator, the monarch. Russia is ruled by the tiny Communist party, Italy by Mussolini, Germany by Hitler; Austria and Hungary meditate the restoration of the Hapsburgs.

The desire for political leadership springs from one of two causes. The first is the possession of a life so busy and emotionally so satisfying as to leave neither time nor energy for political activities: this is usually to be perceived among peasants and housewives, and is the foundation of monarchy. In the King the peasant secs the living embodiment of the loved land: in the Royal Family the woman finds the prototype of her own. The drama of marriage, child-bearing, and death, celebrated in magnificence for them, is charged with meaning for her: their life is symbolic and universal.
The Apostolate of the Laity Through Catholic Action
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

The Twentieth Century is witnessing the rapid growth and development of two world-wide movements within the Catholic Church — the Liturgical Movement and Catholic Action. The close connexion between these two movements is not always appreciated, for both of them have been considerably misunderstood. The authentic Liturgical Movement is not just a rampage for quilismas and outsize chasubles; nor is authentic Catholic Action just a drive for Clean Films, still less a pretext for an intensified campaign of what has been called ‘ecclesiastical ballyhoo.’

On closer acquaintance it will be found that both these movements are instinct with the same idea—the renewal and increase of active participation by the laity in the life and work of the Church, the utilization to the full of the power conveyed by the Character of Baptism and, especially, of Confirmation. The chief objective of the Liturgical Movement is active lay participation in the Church’s worship; it is a revolt from the lamentable state of things which tended to make the layman little more than a passive spectator of the public worship of God. in favour of a return to the corporate congregational worship of the primitive Church. Catholic Action is formally and authoritatively defined by the Holy Father as (active) lay participation in the apostolate of the Hierarchy. It may be regarded as a revolt from the tendency to consider the layman as existing to be ministered unto but not to minister, a reaffirmation of his right and duty to take an active part in the Church’s official mission of salvation.
Catholic Action and the Workers
Authors: van Gestel C.
Published: July 2007

The Holy Father’s ideas concerning Catholic Action have not always been fully understood or exactly interpreted. This is especially true with regard to the relations between Catholic Action, as he envisages it, and the Catholic Social Movement which traces its origin to Leo XIII. It has even been asserted that there is a difference, not to say divergence, between the thought of the two Popes, and that Catholic Action is to supersede the Catholic workers’ organizations, which, it is maintained, have become infected with the materialism they set out to combat, and have, although rejecting class war, brought into the Catholic community a principle of class division inimical to unity among Catholics. On this view, Catholic Action, universal and spiritual, comes as a happy substitute for the social movement inaugurated by Leo XIII.

Others, themselves involved in the workers’ organizations, are apt to consider social action as the highest if not the only form of Catholic Action, forgetting that the term has been given by Pius XI a specific technical meaning which, if not entirely new, conveys a new significance—’ the participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church.'

If we seek for the origins of the term ‘Catholic Action,’ it cannot be denied that there is continuity between the thought of the last five Popes. Pius IX on various occasions called for action from Catholics; Leo XIII exhorted at once to Christian social democratic action and to Catholic action;
A Life of Catholic Action
Authors: Bousfield M. A.
Published: July 2007

He professed his belief in God openly, regarding his religious convictions as a soldier on active service does his uniform, which he wears always and never exchanges for another dress ... In times like these this, so to say, intransigent Christian, can teach us all a lesson.’ In these words an Italian socialist newspaper summed up a student of the University of Turin who died in July, 1925, at the age of twenty-four. The man who made such an impression upon those who did not share his faith was Pier Giorgio Frassati, an engineering student, the son of a former Italian Ambassador in Berlin, an athlete and mountaineer, goodlooking, gay and popular, who, during his short life had made himself so beloved among the poor and among his fellow students that his funeral was something like a pilgrimage.

The life of Frassati is a shining example of that apostolate of the laity which Pius XI calls Catholic Action, and since there is very little literature in English to make clear how Catholic Action works out in practice, those who wish to know more about it cannot do better than read the account of his life, translated from the Italian, which although rather too much abbreviated, gives a vivid picture of a most attractive personality.

Pier Giorgio was essentially of the laity: he had no wish to be a priest or religious. He would have proposed marriage to a girl with whom he was deeply in love, but for the fact that he knew that for some reason she would not be acceptable to his parents, and out of loyalty to them he put the thought aside, at great sacrifice to himself.
Saints Ancient and Modern
Authors: Swinstead A. E. H.
Published: July 2007

ENGLISH Catholics are sometimes charged with indifference to the English saints, with looking to Lisieux instead of Rochester or London or Canterbury. It is not my purpose to argue the truth of this complaint; indeed I propose to take it for granted. Certainly there are C.T.S. tract cases where Ste. Therèse sells much better than Blessed Thomas More. And there is a sense in which no one has any right to grumble. A saint is a saint; the better Englishman for being so, but not the better saint for being English. The terms of reference, so to say, are not national, and there are considerable disadvantages about nationalism in hagiology. The elements of sanctity are the same everywhere. Still, it is also true that these elements are expressed differently, take on a different colouring, according to the natural circumstances of the person who manifests them. Grace builds upon nature, and though the saint is no more a saint for being English, yet he need be no less English for being a saint. Hence it is that we rightly find something congenial in saints of our own nation; hence, too, that our own saints are not ignored without loss. The essentials of sanctity are the same in all the saints, but in so stupendous a success everything is of interest. This man, this woman, succeeded in the only success that is really worth having. We watch their actions and ways in the hope of surprising their secret, and inevitably we want to imitate, so far as we can; to emulate, not only in the very heart of the thing, but in methods, habits, practices, whereby that heart was expressed and confirmed.
The Catholic Social Programme
Authors: Watt Lewis
Published: July 2007

It is only as the consequence of a misunderstanding that some seek for a detailed social policy in the encyclicals of the Popes. One must not expect to find in them a pronouncement in favour of protection or free trade, a discussion of various monetary systems with a decision in favour of one of them, or even an exhortation to introduce the Eight Hours working day. As Leo XIII and Pius XI have repeatedly said, their intervention in the field of social reconstruction is based entirely on their official duty to safeguard and promote religion and morality, both of which are necessarily involved in the organization of society. The Popes make no claim to be economists or financiers, still less to be engineers or agriculturists; but they do most emphatically claim the right to lay down the moral principles which must be respected by all classes of mankind, and to point out the forms assumed by those principles in relation to the political, economic, financial and technical organization of society. Those who complain that such encyclicals as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum or Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno do not enter into greater detail would do better to reflect on this illustration of the Church’s desire to leave as much liberty to individuals and States as she can without failing in her duty as guardian of the moral law. Given several alternative policies, any one of which may be pursued without any violation of morality, the Church is quite content to leave the choice between them to those who are entrusted with the care of national interests, or who have a part to play in the social mechanism by virtue of their economic functions.
The Christian Revolution
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

It must not be thought, because the Christian Church condemns Marxist Communism, that she thereby identifies herself with those who attack it because it seeks to uproot the ‘existing order.’ The Christian's case against Communism is not that it is revolutionary but that it is counter-revolutionary; that it is, in theory and practice, diametrically opposed to the principles of the Christian Revolution, to the Christian conception of Society, to the Christian conception of human personality and destiny. The Christian Church has a long memory, and she cannot fail to recognize in salient features of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy a resuscitation of the pre-Christian and pagan conceptions from which the Christian Revolution delivered civilization. This reactionary re-paganization of society is by no means a peculiar or distinctive Eeature of Communism, but it is in Communism that it finds at present its most explicit, logical and ruthless expression. A sincere and authentic Christianity will not oppose ‘Marxism by joining forces with liberalism, individualist-capitalism, bourgeoisism and suchlike representatives of the ‘existing order’ (which it finds hardly less abhorrent), but by reasserting the principles of the Christian Revolution and by revitalizing its forces. In these pages we shall attempt, so far as space permits, to sketch the basic conceptions of this Christian Revolution, as a concrete and dynamic historical reality, with a view to suggesting how it may again become a real, positive and dominant factor in social reconstruction.
Boethius and More
Authors: Bancroft George
Published: July 2007

During the Middle Ages no two works were more popular than the City of God and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. To the former Charlemagne listened at meals : ‘Inter caenandum aut aliquod acroama aut lectorum audiebat .... Delectabatur et libris Sancti Augustini praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei praetitulati sunt.’ A generation later Alfred in England translated the Consolation, ranking it together with the Regula Pastoralis and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as a fitting instrument for the education of his people. Already Boethius had coloured the great Anglo-Saxon secular epic Beowulf with the influence of his thought, just as in later years Chaucer interpreted Boccaccio with the insight of the Consolation, tinting the Italian’s realism with the compassion that springs from that bond uniting God and man, alternus amor. To Boethius, introducing Aristotle to Western Europe, scholasticism is as much indebted as to the Arab commentators. For if Averroes and Avicenna led Albert the Great and Aquinas to Aristotelian nietaphysics it was Boethius who had provided the basis of scientific thought in translating into Latin the Organon and annotating in the style of Themistius the Isagoge of Porphyry. Through Cassiodorus again he established the ratio studiorum, the trivium and quadrivium, which remained substantially unchanged until the seventeenth century. To Dante he is the eighth light, of the company of St. Thomas and Richard of St. Victor, ‘si trovan molte gioie care e belle tanto che non si posson trar del regno!’ Boethius has fallen into an obscurity that on all counts is undeserved.
Fascism and Religion
Authors: Shove Herbert
Published: July 2007

One of the greatest obstacles that confronts the Fascist Movement in Britain to-day is the opposition of the British public to its arch-enemy. Because Communism is a ‘totalitarian’ doctrine and it is also the very essence of Fascism that ‘a Kingdom divided against itself cannot stand’ the two are lumped together as both standing for a tyrannous ‘dictatorship’ over the citizen by an all-powerful State, extraneous to himself and assumed to be coercive of his will. Nothing could be more unjust to Fascism.

The Fascist conception of the State is not of a thing extraneous to the citizen. To the Fascist the State is himself ‘ with a plus.’ As a man—if he is fit to have one—regards his family, or a soldier—if he be worthy of the name—his regiment, or a footballer—if he is fit to be in it—his team, so, in the Fascist conception, must the citizen—if he is worthy to be accounted as such—regard his country. Thus a man works for his family, which includes himself, a footballer plays for his team, which includes himself, a soldier fights for his regiment, which includes himself, and a citizen must work, play or fight for his country, which includes his family, his team, his regiment and himself. This is the corporate spirit which is Fascism, in contradistinction to the individualistic spirit of ‘liberalism,’ which regards the association as to be valued and worked for by the individual only in so far as it serves his individual ends—the doctrine of ‘enlightened self-interest'—and its natural outcome in the ‘class war ‘of Communism.
Roman Retrospects
Authors: Rope H. E. G.
Published: July 2007

‘IN perpetual quiet, Oxford, I believe, is the only city that resembles Rome,’ wrote Aubrey de Vere in the Spring of 1839, words that sound strangely in 1933. Even the Rome of Leo XIII was strangely noisy to those who remembered the dignified peaceful Rome of Pius IX before 20th September, 1870. All artists, many of them foreigners and Protestants, deplored and denounced the change that followed the invasion, among them Augustus Hare, Ruskin, and countless others, including Gregorovius, who hated the Temporal Power and yet thus scathed, in a letter of 1885, its destroyers.

‘The violent transformation which Rome has undergone affords me no pleasure; the city appears to me like a carpet of ancient date, which during the process of beating goes to pieces amid clouds of dust. All the traces of my past life have been obliterated, destroyed, and built over; and the majestic city of former days has been superseded by the tumult of modern life, which is still seeking definite shape, but will hardly succeed in attaining it for a generation to come.’
The Case for Italy
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

An American newspaper has described the attack on Abyssinia as the wickedest war in history. And indeed few wars have seemed less excusable or aroused more universal disgust. Apart from all questions of British interests involved, and apart from the hypocrisy suggested by such an attitude (for it is undeniable that Britain has repeatedly done much that Italy is doing to-day), nothing could be better calculated to offend the sentimental-sporting instincts of the British public of 1935 than the spectacle of a well-equipped modem army with planes, bombs, tanks and (it seems) poison-gas invading a primitive, independent African state.

But though sentiment may give, up to a point, a trustworthy indication of objective right and wrong, it is in the light of dispassionate reasoning and the unbiassed examination of facts that the ethics of Italy’s attack must be scrutinized. What is to be said of it in the light of Catholic teaching? The ethical aspect of the conflict (which the Christian knows to be the most fundamental one) has received insufficient attention.
The Return of Abel
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

In the first place is the preoccupation, “What can we do about the poor?” It is an encouraging uneasiness even if it is only an uneasiness and not a profound unrest. And it certainly does produce its results; quite excellent results; young men become members of the S.V.P.

In the second place is the intellectual argument that commercial industrialism will not do. It rests on authority. It impresses. We applaud Father Drinkwater and Eric Gill.

Two surface responses. Our sympathy has been stirred, our intelligence convinced of wrong and of the possibility of right solution. We heartily wish someone would implement the right solution. We mention it in our prayers, rather shyly wondering what God thinks of our economic phraseology. After all it is very worrying, but we really have done what we could.

In the first place is the repeated plea of Eric Gill that commercial industrialism has reduced the working masses to a subhuman condition of intellectual irresponsibility. It is a strident plea. You cannot shut your ears to it. But if we are to think of a downright solution it means a downright change in the material structure of society. “Man is matter and spirit, soul and body, both real, both good.” Irresponsibility can only be remedied by responsibility; but to translate this into economics responsibility means ownership, or at least an effective share in the control of the material things which very really involve our destiny. We cannot consider with equanimity any large transference of ownership from one kind of people to another unless it takes place in the usual way through the usual commercial channels. We do not like to think of changes which may involve disturbances in the material order.
The Martyrs
Authors: Leitch N. S.
Published: July 2007

When, from the clouds of our actual vantage-point, we consider the date 1535, we are immediately conscious, because of the glorious event which illuminates this present year of suspense, of a scaffold and a block. Four hundred years intervene, and we shall perhaps congratulate ourselves on their passage, since the use of the headsman's axe as a means of religious persuasion has vanished with them and physical danger in the practise of our faith is at an end. We look back with humble reverence and gratitude to that scaffold set in the midst of our country and our history, where the two Blessed Martyrs, now to be canonized, welcomed the ultimate opportunity; and although we may be thankful that such an opportunity comes no more to Englishmen in England (since, by a curious paradox, we would often more willingly choose a life of heroism than a heroic death), we reverence them the more for their fortitude in a trial we are spared.

Their fame shines for us across the centuries, and we love them for holiness and wisdom, for wit and prevailing courage, timeless attributes displayed by them in a vanished time; for everything of that day has disappeared, the frame of life and its preoccupations, the look and sound of it. Gone is that world of individual efforts and harvests, and we think of it as a pastoral picture painted in clear tones, the green English scene enlivened by the peasant in his homespun, made ceremonial by the daily silks and velvets of the great. Its arguments and sufferings, its discoveries and abuses, are only knowledge for us.

But it was a time like this in which we live; new power, new danger, and new tyranny were abroad, and established things were threatened with disruption.
Professor Max Drennan
Authors: Stockley W. F. P.
Published: July 2007

The scholarship and wit, the lovable personality and frank geniality of the late Professor Drennan have been spoken of in two notices in the Times, the month of his death, January, 1935.

Therein, too, it is noted that, in his England, at seventeen he adopted Catholicism “with characteristic enthusiasm.” From these convertites there is much matter to be learnt, said Jaques. There is; and from their wandering away; and from their return. ‘Twas so with Drennan, truly a wanderer from his birth. Bom in home county Banbury, he had taught in Ceylon under the Oblate Fathers, and had been in the United States before I first knew him, when he and I taught together, in Canada in 1903. Later he was Professor of English in Galway, at the time of the European War and of the Irish Rising of 1916. And, last of all, he was in Johannesburg (from 1917), where for nigh twenty years he lived; and where he died. In South Africa he said he at last found a home wherein he could settle down. But he kept in touch with England, as a member of the Authors’ Club, London; which he joined, he said, “in the impossible event of my going over.” And he was a not infrequent jester in Punch. His humour, if it had a distinctive touch, may, perhaps, be said to be specially English; although Protestant Irish, seemingly all Celtic, was his descent. Persons of mind have praised M.D.’s Punch pieces. In Canada, he was The Canadian Month’s “Eno Poppyhock,” with his “Olla Podrida,” finding “irrational” the almanack's June 25 succeeding June 24. “It is also monotonous. Why should April 2nd always follow April 1st? Is there any reason why it should?
The Mystical Body
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

In the meandering of mankind through the ages the stream of vitality has flown back and forth from one system of life to its opposite. At present we seem to be in a transitional period when the main stream is sweeping back from individualism to an extreme collectivism. Since the Reformation men have done violence to their social nature by attempting to work out their own salvation independently of others. There were times when this seemed to be the only way of achieving any vital movement, since the alternative of cooperation and corporal unity lay apparently dead among a heap of legalities and impositions from a tyrannous authority. The reign of the individualist, however, though it made many new and valuable conquests, could not endure for long, for of its nature it was doomed to fall to pieces. Now we see a return to co-operation, to the united efforts of many men sharing one ideal. This is glaringly obvious in the dictatorships supported by the enthusiasm of the people, and in the growing solidarity of Communism; but it appears in religious spheres as well, in such movements as those of the Groups or leading to the absurdity of Christian and Jew attempting to find a common religious basis in a symposium entitled “In Spirit and Truth.”

Though the true Christianity of the Catholic Church has always been essentially social, it was inevitable that it should have been influenced to some extent by the common outlook on life. The stress was laid on the relations between the individual soul and God, while the idea of brotherhood in Christ, though not forgotten, was put in the background. The return of vitality in other spheres to the sense of fellowship and co-operation of men in society has been the occasion of a revival of interest in the social character of the Church.
Lay Thought on American Catholic Action
Authors: McLarney A.
Published: July 2007

Americans, as a result of regional divergencies, are often more remote in culture from each other than from England or even from the Continent. But the roots of our culture are Protestant and English and there is, moreover, a similarity of spiritual background and problem which unites American and English Catholics. We are confronted by the same religious apathy within the fold; we must combat the same ignorance from without. Americans are beginning to realize how different would have been the background and the atmosphere of our country had the French and Spanish continued to settle North America; not because these settlers were Latins, but because they were steeped in a culture engendered by the living tradition of the Latin Church. The friars in California, the French in the south and in Canada might have moulded a people to beauty, as M. Maritain says, and we would not be in our present dire need of traditional influences and customs which must become aged in wood or stone or generation. Ere they were forged, our links with a Catholic past were broken by the Yankee ascendancy. In England the surviving faithful few held the broken ends together. So it follows that the culture of the American is more bankrupt than the culture of the average Englishman. But we may take heart, for as Mgr. William J. Kerby told the students of the National Catholic Schoool of Social Service: “Our Catholic vision of life is wide and our countiy's need of that vision is profound. We bring the best in motive.“*

As the work of the lay apostolate swings into the mental orbit of the earnest American Catholic, there are certain high lights which illumine his vision, certain dim torches which would bum bravely if given the impetus.