bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Sacraments: IV—Marriage
Authors: Bright Laurence 
Published: August 2024

In considering this sacrament we have again to see how something natural has been transformed by the power of god acting through his Church. As in penance, where the matter of the sacrament is sorrow for sin, what is transformed is not something non-human, such as oil or water, but the mutual consent of a man and a woman to give themselves to one another for the purpose of continuing the human race; something, that is to say, effectively significant even before it is given a new dignity by the action of Christ. For marriage is as old as the human race, and following the lead given by St Paul (Ephesians v, 31) we can learn its significance from the original institution in Paradise.The account given in the book of Genesis (ii, 18-24) begins with God's action in creating a partner for Adam, because ‘It is not good for man to be alone’.
Res Sacra
Authors: Magee Malcolm 
Published: August 2024

In last month's article ‘Sacrament and Symbol’ we say something of the nature of the sacramental sign and its relationship to the human creature for whom it was instituted. But the sign exists for the sake of the thing signified and its most important function (though not its only function) is to lead us to a knowledge of this thing signified. In this article, therefore, I propose to give a short account of what St Thomas understood by res sacra, the sacred reality lying behind the sign.For this sacred reality is the thing signified. ‘A sacrament, says St Augustine, ‘is the sign of a sacred reality’; and St Thomas adds, ‘in so far as it is making men holy’. The Augustinian definition is too wide; as wide, in fact, as it possibly can be for it includes the whole of creation.
A Technique Of Spiritual Liberation
Authors: Regamey P.-R. 
Published: August 2024

A technique of freedom? The expression is, quite certainly, too strong. A title says what it can, as briefly as it can. Properly speaking we have no right to hope from our own efforts anything but conditions favourable to the play of our freedom—let that be clearly understood from the start. Nevertheless we shall see better what we ought to hope from the means, and what cannot be expected of them, if we take up the matter in several different ways.The word ‘means’ is wholly valid only when applied to material things. You hit a nail with a hammer and you (who are not clumsy) drive it in, and even do so in such a way that the effect is exactly proportionate to the communication of your energy to the nail and the resistance of the wall.The ‘means’ is sufficient to the ‘end’. But when you ask yourself what you are going to do to become more vitally, more fully free, no-one will teach you the great means of all the means: it is simply to be free. There is no other means, and all that you can do will be worth’while only in order to vary this means according to the particular case.
The Nature of Accidie (II)
Authors: Cassian John 
Published: August 2024

To The embers of such faults, then, he now hastens to apply a suitable remedy, and laying aside the apostolic power which he recently called into play, he turns once more to speak with the heart of a kind father or a gentle physician, and, as speaking to his children or his patients, he presents the medicine of health with words of salutary counsel, on this wise: ‘Them that are such, we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus that with quietness they work and eat their own bread’ (2 Thess. 3, 12). He has cured with the one salutary precept of work the causes of such terrible sores which spring from the root of idleness, in the manner of some most skilled physician, and he knows also that the rest of the ailments which sprout up from the same soil will straightway vanish away, when once the primordial disease has been destroyed.If gnawing sadness once gain, by individual attacks, or in different and unseen ways, a power of mastery over our souls, it separates us ever and always from any insight of divine contemplation, and casting down the mind from whatever of purity it might possess, entirely overthrows and depresses it.
The Pulpit Presentation of the Faith
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand 
Published: August 2024

The subject-matter covered by this title is so wide in extent that we are in danger from the outset of being lost in generalities. For this reason I propose to explore one corner only of its extensive field, by confining myself to the parochial apostolate. I think you will find that the more general principles will emerge.Let us begin with a quotation:‘Television is a blessing', an American Bishop said recently. ‘Spiritually radio and television are beautiful examples of the inspired wisdom of the ages. Radio is like the Old Testament … hearing of wisdom without seeing; television is like the New Testament because in it the wisdom becomes flesh and dwells among us…. We are thankful to radio and television for being the most spiritual symbols of the truth by which we are saved.'Is that statement true or fanciful? You may have your own ideas about that. There are however one or two incontrovertible facts about this new situation.
An Approach to Prayer
Authors: Vo Der Heydt Vera 
Published: August 2024

Hundreds and thousands of books on prayer exist. Many of them are handbooks from which one can learn of and be instructed in the science and art of prayer. I am not going to speak about those things, but about attitude. I have met with regard to prayer.I know full well the difficulties connected with this attempt. The word ‘prayer’ touches us off in our emotions and it may make us feel embarrassed, apprehensive, or even hostile to hear about it, as it may come very close, too close, to the innermost secrets of our hearts. The idea of prayer may bring up deeply hidden wounds and despair when we think of times when we prayed in anguish for a chalice to be taken away, and it was not. Our distress may have started in childhood when we were taught to pray, and when we were told that prayer is always answered. We may have prayed and asked for a sunny day, or mother's understanding or father's safety, and it rained, and mother did not understand, and father was killed.
The Sacraments: V—Order
Authors: Bright Laurence 
Published: August 2024

The sacrament of order is much less familiar to most people than the sacraments which have so far been considered. Every Catholic has been baptized, confirmed, has gone to confession; many are married or have assisted at a marriage; very few have taken part in an ordination. The priesthood is often falsely thought of as a special privileged state, remote from the Catholic community at large, and naturally there is little interest in the sacrament by which priests are made. We must therefore begin by getting an idea of the meaning of priesthood in relation to the whole Christian people.A priest is a man who offers sacrifice to God. In the Old Testament we find careful regulations for the offering of ritual sacrifices of every kind by the official priests.
Christian Materialism
Authors: Dawson Clare 
Published: August 2024

One of the recurrent objections to Christianity, from the time when, as St John records, many disciples forsook our Lord because he said he would give us his flesh to eat, is that it is materialist, and the objectors wish the materialistic lumps could be strained out of the soup, which would then be a pure nourishment, suited to the most delicate digestion. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Christianity is not a mass of facts from which we can pick what we like and reject the rest, but an organic whole, and that truth is bound to present some difficulties to human minds, it may be worth considering what revelation has to tell us about matter.Obviously to material beings such as ourselves the subject is meaningful. he world confronts us as a reality: so does our own flesh.
Our Lord's Tears and St Catherine's
Authors: Hinnebusch Paul 
Published: August 2024

Jesus, in the days of his earthly life, with a loud cry and tears, offered up prayers and supplications to him who was able to save him from death, and was heard because of his reverent submission'. (Heb. 5. 7). Thus writes St Paul of the prayer and agony of Christ in the garden.Notice that St Paul does not say that Jesus prayed to be saved from death. but to ‘him who was able to save him from death'. For what, then, did he pray, if not to be saved from death; St Catherine of Siena gives an answer to this question which at first surprised her spiritual director, Blessed Raymond of Capua. But after hearing Catherine's further explanation, Raymond could say only: ‘I kept silent, and simply admired the grace and wisdom she had received from God'. (Raymond of Capua, St Catherine of Siena New York: p. 147).
The Book of Lamentations
Authors: Robinson Bernard 
Published: August 2024

The Lamentations of Jeremiah is a book with which the old Tenebree Office for Holy Week gave many people at least a nodding acquaintance. Not infrequently, however, the much admired musical settings tended to detract from the attention given to the words themselves, a fact noticed by Mendelssohn, who remarked that the most powerful music was usually expended on the mere rubrics, the alephs beths, and incipits. That Lamentations does repay, both for theological and for literary content, a careful study, will I hope emerge from this article. But before we speak of content, we should say a word or two about the structure and authorship of the book.The book consists of five poems, corresponding to its five chapters of which the first four are abecedarian in structure (which is to say that each stanza begins with a fresh letter of the Hebrew alphabet and each line of the stanza begins with the same letter as the first line)
Retreat and Action
Authors: Luff S. G. A. 
Published: August 2024

If so many modern forms of apostolate require their members to make an annual retreat, or even a monthly day of recollection, I am inclined to think it is far less a case of their organizers including something from the familiar Catholic stock-in-trade than one of needing to satisfy a real want. It really is an impressive feature of the twentieth-century apostolate and goes a long way to prove its authenticity. As long as apostles—actionists—realize they have nothing to give without first finding it in prayer and seclusion we can trust their work to be truly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.The first rousers of conscience among the Catholics of France and Belgim were the Abbé Cardijn and later the Abbé Godin, creating The Young Christian Workers to redeem an entire class; not a remote dusky jungle-dwelling race, but a nation of neighbours, living in the closed World of factories and workshops, who had become alienated from the Church.
The Family and the School
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: August 2024

One of the points most strongly emphasized in the two great encyclicals of Pius XI on Christian Marriage (Casti Connubii) and The Christian Education of Youth (Divini Illius Magistri) is that the foundation of true education is the family. That is where education begins and where the ground of human personality is first prepared for its full growth to maturity. If this basic education is missing or defective all further education is liable to be like building an elaborate superstructure on faulty and insecure foundations or trying to cultivate plants in poisoned or exhausted soil.Unfortunately there seems to be a growing tendency, even among practising Catholics, to shift the responsibility for the basic education of the young from the family circle to the school. A tendency to imagine that the good nuns or other teachers from the infant school onwards, will do all that is necessary in the way of teaching religion. It is almost taken for granted in consequence that the father and mother, and elder brothers and sisters, have no immediate concern with the religious atmosphere in which the younger children are growing up.
Adaptations in France—III
Authors: Dubois J. M. 
Published: August 2024

If, in order to remain truly religious, any adaptation must leave untouched the essence of the vows of obedience, and of poverty, it is even more evident that it must not touch the essence of the vow of virginity. One day I was reading various passages from the Directory of the ancelles to a Benedictine nun. The paragraph concerning obedience began with these words. ‘Fundamentally it is obedience which makes nuns of you.’ She exclaimed: ‘Oh, no, indeed! If I am a nun it is before all because I am a consecrated virgin!’ I think that as a matter of fact she was right. Of the three vows one can say that in substance virginity is, by all that it offers and expresses, the most characteristic of a religious. consecration. Perhaps we shall come back to this. In any case it clear that there can be no toning down in the practice of chastity. Consecration to God is an absolute.However, in this sphere as with the others a certain adaptation is noteworthy. It lies either in the teaching of the vow of chastity or in the traditional ascetism organized with a view to its preservation.
Adaptation in France—IV
Authors: Dubois J. M. 
Published: August 2024

The examination we have made of each of the three vows reveals at least in principle the various domains where — problems of adaptation might be, and in fact are, posed, aat we have noticed is sufficient to indicate in what directions their possible solutions lie.Nevertheless, before concluding it would be interesting to consider certain of the most important dimensions of the religious life. As we have already spoken of observances in dealing with virginity, it will be enough to consider rapidly three kinds of cases Particularly instructive: first of all prayer and silence; in the second place formation and intellectual work; and finally questions of hierarchy and government. Prayer And Silence In all that concerns prayer and silence, it is clear that the life of the ancelles, or of any nun more or less involved in the world, as also the life of sisters in a secular institute, does not profit by the guarantees offered by a stable existence in a convent.
What is the Church?—in: The New Creation
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: August 2024

In this article and the ones which follow we shall be looking in some detail at the system of sacraments which constitutes the framework of the Church. It will perhaps be remembered that in a previous article I said that certain things which are said metaphorically of the people of God in the Old Testament are said literally of Christ; and these same expressions—'first bom son of God', ‘priest of Yahweh', etc., are to be said sacramentally of the new people of God, the Church. The Church is Christ existing sacramentally in the world; existing, that is, in our hearts by means of the system of sacraments.It is common to treat of each sacrament as fulfilling some particular spiritual need of a man or as corresponding to some phase of his natural life. In what follows we shall use a rather different method. We shall try to understand each sacrament by seeing what part it has to play iin the realisation of the Church.
Scripture Words—II: World and Flesh
Authors: Johnston Leonard 
Published: August 2024

Hebrew thought, and therefore the Hebrew way of speaking, is concrete and realist. Greek thought, which has influenced to some degree all our western civilization, is abstract, speculative, analytic. For example, by reflection and analysis Greek philosophy arrived at the notion of man composed of two elements—the one visible and material, the other invisible and spiritual; and for most of us it has become almost instinctive to speak of man as composed of ‘body and soul’, without realising that we are speaking in terms of Greek philosophy.But the Hebrews took man as they found him—he is just a man, a single thing, a living being endowed with movement and intelligence and speech. of Course, they did distinguish different aspects of this single being, they could look at him from different points of view; but these different aspects were simply aspects of the same single whole— not separate parts which were really different things and only accidentally united.
Person and the Place—IV: Fontevrault
Authors: Webb Geoffrey 
Published: August 2024

Fontevrault is not one of the compelling architectural landmarks of the Val de Loire, Saint-Benoît or Cunault. It is just apeaceful, rambling old place that one visits because its splendid name and all its connotations have a fascination of their own. The English remember that Henry II and Richard, Queen Eleanor and King John's wife were buried There, whil the French will remind you that Bertrade de Montfort, the mistress of Philip I, took the veil there and died of her austerities. But beside its well known connections with royal families, there is the attractive contradiction of Fontevrault having housed women of quite another StamP—lepers, prostitutes, and social outcasts of various kinds. That contradiction is sufficient to convince us that a really original and Christ-like mind must have been at work in this place.Within the abbey, a first impression is of size and splendour and fine Materials. The elaborate kitchen gives an idea of the numbers involved In the institution.
The Scapegoat and the Underdog
Authors: Foster John 
Published: August 2024

In comparing the very vivid sense the Israelites of the Old Testament had of themselves as the chosen people to the shght feeling modern-day Christians have for themselves as the new people of God, it is interesting to notice that a powerful symbol (that of the scapegoat), integral to the Jewish law of holiness, has been reproduced in the Christian way of life with a much less valid one (that of the underdog).In the book of Leviticus (16. 2-28) one can read how, before the high priest entered the Holy of Holies each year, two buck goats were presented to him, one of which was not killed but symbolically through a laying-on of hands, invested with the sins of the people; then led away by a man appointed for the purpose to an uninhabited place in the wilderness, there to be let loose or pushed over the rocks from the top of a mountain.
The Divine Mission of the Holy Ghost
Authors: McDonagh Hilary 
Published: August 2024

In the prayer composed by Pope Pius XII for the Jubilee Year of 1950, there is one petition that comes strikingly back to my mind as I am invited to write on the subject of the Holy Ghost. It is: ‘grant unto orphans, affectionate protection'; and it is particularly by the gift of the Holy Spirit that God answers such a petition. Indeed it Would be better to say that it is with no less a gift than that of the Holy Spirit that the prayer is answered. We who are ‘orphans’ as far as the lives of our spirit are concerned, have ourselves to blame if we do not benefit always by that affectionate protection with the giving of which the mission of the Holy Ghost is concerned.In the Encyclical ‘Divinum Illud’ (9 May, 1897), specially devoted to the Holy Ghost, Leo XIII deplored the fact that the third Person of the Trinity is so little known and his divine mission so little appreciated by us.
… And in the Holy Ghost
Authors: Armstrong Pease 
Published: August 2024

The Forgotten Paraclete', the title of a small and now unobtainable book by a Catholic writer (Mgr Maurice Laudrieux), suggests that the ‘normal’ spirituality taught in seminaries and faithfully distributed to the Catholic flock since the seventeenth century has tended to ignore both the theology of the Holy Ghost and the necessary corollaries which should develop from it in daily Christian prayer and life.This has not happened without some historically recognisable reason. Pére Congar, O.P., explains the situation when he writes: ‘Heresies always represent the erection into a system of undue or partial emphasis on a particular point of view…. In face of these one-sided deformations of truth the Church affirms indeed not only the particular truth which is perverted, but the whole corpus of truth which is above all partial statements…. It is quite impossible that apologists should not seek to re-establish the partially misunderstood truths, and that theologians should not devote themselves to more precise and detailed development of doctrine…. Wherever an erroneous emphasis or statement is made, the organism of the Church stiffens into concentrated resistance, with the result that since error is always partial, dogmatic truth runs the risk of appearing partial as well.’
Marriage
Authors: Sheed Rosemary 
Published: August 2024

In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue i t … .And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. (Gen. i. 27-8; 2. 23-5).This was what daily life was to be for man, unfallen and unredeemed. Then man rebelled, trying to make himself independent of God, and succeeded only in making himself subject to his own weakness and dependent on the rest of creation.
On Visiting the Sick
Authors: Boos Thomas 
Published: August 2024

Some years ago I spent several days in the surgical ward of a provincial hospital. My coming had, I learnt later, wrought a subtle change in the patients’ general behaviour, but I was accepted as one of them, and was pleased to find a camaraderie of quite a remarkable kind among the men, who were of all ages. There were two exceptions to this, but each of these unfriendly characters was eventually won over by the whole ward. There was officially no other Catholic patient, and this perhaps made it easier for each of the men to look on the monk as ‘belonging’ to him.It was an enriching experience in many ways. Among much else I learnt something of the complex problem provided by the injunction to visit the sick, which the catechism calls one of the corporal works of mercy.
Bringing up Father
Authors: Campbell Duncan 
Published: August 2024

I want, for my own satisfaction and perhaps others', to set down as clearly as I can some thoughts about the place of the priest in today's world. It wants some thinking about, I feel.First of all there is very little written on the subject that comes my way. I remember a deliberately superficial and snap picture in the Observer recently of various clergymen, very sympathetic with the Catholic priest, though one wondered on the evidence just why; a strange novel, The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O'Connor, which I found evasive and lacking in the decisiveness there must be in a priest, somewhere one hopes even in the vague, tired, washed-out priest that one does see often; and another book I have just got hold of, Priests and People, by Conor Ward: this an excellent sociological study so far as I can judge of a ‘typical’ Liverpool parish, though it leaves out deliberately the personal life of the priest.
The Liturgy as Prayer—I
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: August 2024

I want to begin by quoting a passage from St Paul which provides a good introduction to what I have to say. He is talking to the Colossians about rising with Christ and living in Christ's life. He goes on to say:Put ye on as the elect of God, holy and beloved, the bowels of mercy, benignity, humility, modesty, patience, bearing with one another, and forgiving one another if any have a complaint against another; even as the Lord hath forgiven you so do you also. But above all these things have charity, which is the bond of perfection; and let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts, wherein also you are called in one body; and be ye thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you abundantly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual canticles, singing in grace in your hearts to God.