bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The University Apostolate
Authors: Wheeler Gordon 
Published: July 2007

It is safe to say that the new conception of the University Apostolate, outlined in papal pronouncements and in the deliberations of Pax Romana, the international organisation for Catholic graduates and undergraduates of the universities of the world, constitutes one of the most important aspects of Catholic Action in our age. This article does not concern the Catholic Universities but solely those of the ancient secularised or the modem ‘red-brick’ variety which share the same fundamental problems. For they lack the integrity—to use Newman’s own expression—which the Church alone can give them. There is no need to diagnose the problem more fully than that, for in this age of introspection it is generally recognised. There is an ever-increasing concern, for example, over the dangers of specialisation. There is a general recognition of the fact that true university education is in danger of being lost in the pursuit of technicalism. The high-blown pride of secularisation has broken under it and there is a chastened search for the right solution.The Church therefore has a tremendous opportunity in the middle years of this century, for her role is no longer a merely defensive one. As Cardinal Pizzardo said at Mariastein in 1949: ‘Pax Romana today can no longer limit itself—after the manner of old-fashioned Catholic Action—to protecting Catholic university people against the dangers of their environment; it must on the contrary develop in them a spirit of apostolate and conquest.’ The present Pope, speaking to the men of Italian Catholic Action in September 1947, said: ‘Not only defence but conquest. ... He who limits himself to being always on the defensive, slowly loses ground.. . . Do not isolate yourselves... . Imitate the Christians of the first centuries! Only thus, through ever-renewed action and penetration in the pagan world can the Church grow and make progress.’ And Cardinal Suhard, the late Archbishop of Paris, outlined this new approach in his now world-famous pastoral letters. It is summed up in those catch-phrases: the apostolate of ‘like to like’ and of ‘community to community’.
The Lollard Bible
Authors: Colledge Eric 
Published: July 2007

The year 1950 marked the centenary of the publication by Forshall and Madden of their monumental edition of the Lollard Bible; and since then two works have appeared to remind us how many problems their edition and the scholarship which has been founded on it have failed to solve.Professor Margaret Deanesly can claim special authority for her lecture, and our respectful attention, for it comes as an agreeable echo of her pronouncements, thirty years ago, in The Lollard Bible, upon almost every matter connected with this field of study. Her major work received Coulton’s imprimatur, and although it shows her, as do all her writings, as an impartial, generous and urbane figure, it served further to show that the facts were on Coulton’s side, in his vast and unedifying conflict with Gasquet, when he contended that St Thomas More, writing that he had seen English Bibles, ‘fair and old’, in the houses of his friends, who used them with the approval of the Church, could not possibly be referring to an orthodox, post-Wycliffite translation, because no such new translation was ever made.In this recent lecture, Professor Deanesly presents the Lollard Bible to us not as Coulton saw it, as a great act of charity that Christ’s hungry might be fed, but rather as an instrument of Wycliffe’s policy, the grand design being the replacement of canon law by an English text of the Scriptures as the authority to which he might appeal. Wycliffe the Poor Preacher she regards as a romantic invention; and she shows us to him instead as an adroit and agile theologian, a trained controversialist, a don high in the esteem and secure in the protection of his university.
The Apologetic Problem Today
Authors: Ryan Columba 
Published: July 2007

The classical acceptance of the term ‘apologetics’ comprehends in general whatever bears upon the defence and justification of religion. And in the specifically Christian and Catholic context this becomes particularly a question of establishing the reasonable credibility of the revelation made by Christ and mediated by the Church. Hence the traditional treatises de Revelatione and de Ecclesia. But there is no question in the present paper of engaging in any discussion of these venerable themes. The problem is the more general one of communication in a certain context. It is the problem, namely, of communicating the Word of God to the contemporary mind. This is the perennial concern of every apostle. The solution brought to it will determine the whole course of his apostolate. And the first necessity of all is to recognise that the problem exists, and is novel with every new generation. Perhaps never so novel in its implications as in our own time.By ‘communication’ I mean simply the ‘getting across’ of something to others. But it is in a particular context that we have here to do with communication—in the context of the Word of God vis-à-vis the contemporary situation. First, therefore, we should avoid the mistake of supposing that to ‘get across’ the Word of God is like ‘getting across’ anything else. For, strictly, it is not we who ‘get across’ the Word of God. He himself alone speaks to the faith of men. Nevertheless, he does use us, reasonable beings, as communicative instruments, and there is the problem of how we shall render ourselves apt tools to this work. We do, also, even in our own right act dispositively upon those to whom he, by our instrumentality, addresses his Word, and so prepare them for its reception; and this imposes upon us a problem of approach.
The Enigma of Savonarola
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

For my part, I am not sure my mind is not made up one way or the other . . . but to conclude, I say this: if he was good we have seen in our day a great prophet; if bad, a very great man. . . .’So wrote Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine who, as a boy of fifteen, may have seen Savonarola hanged in the Piazza della Signoria. Guicciardini was one of the cleverest Italians of his time and one of the most coolheaded of all time, and his mind was never cooler than when he penned his judgment on Savonarola. The dilemma it expresses can hardly be avoided unless one entirely disbelieves in ‘prophecy’. Certainly Guicciardini, for all his cool detachment, believed that God could still send prophets into the world; he used the term seriously; which may not have been the case with his near-contemporary and fellow-citizen Machiavelli who wrote off the ‘unnamed prophet’ as a failure. But even Machiavelli said ‘of such a man one should speak with reverence’; which, coming from such an observer, is a notable, if perhaps ironical, compliment to Savonarola, and is also valuable evidence of his reputation, in undevout circles, with the generation which followed his own.A great prophet or a very great man: the Church has so far not resolved this dilemma by allowing or disallowing, finally, and officially, the first alternative. Certainly the name of Savonarola has been largely restored to favour. Nobody now calls him a heretic. His works are not on the Index. He has had public and recent praise from high authorities in the Church, for example from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin and from the late Master General of the Dominican Order.
The Communist View of Science
Authors: Richens R. H. 
Published: July 2007

The scope of this paper is the relationship between Marxism and science, and I shall deal principally with biology, both because it is the science that has been most affected by the impact of Communism, and because it is the one with which I am best acquainted.To begin, we must go back to the writings of Marx and more particularly of Engels, who was, much preoccupied with scientific questions. It is convenient to distinguish three groups of ideas in these writings, which may be described as materialistic, dialectical and ethical. In common with those whom Marxists call vulgar materialists, people like Büchner and Moleschott, Marx and Engels affirmed that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter—the Marxists say a reflection of matter; they are therefore realists asserting that matter exists independently of human cognition; they believe in strict causal determinacy operating according to physical law; and they deny that God exists. The dialectics comes from Hegel but most of the fundamental notions occur in the Greeks. The most important dialectical principles are firstly, the unity of opposites, which asserts the fundamental interrelatedness of all the objects composing the physical universe, secondly, the idea that change and development follow from the conflict of dialectical opposites, and thirdly, the notion that qualitative change supervenes upon the accumulation of quantitative, changes. The relation of the preceding notions to the ethical tenets of Marxism has always been obscure. For the present purpose two only of the latter need be considered, the notion that knowledge should be utilised for social well-being, and the notion, seldom explicitly stated but constantly implied, of equality in rights between all sorts of human beings. These two notions have obvious religious affiliations, which however need not be discussed here.
Communism in Russia Today
Authors: Frank Victor 
Published: July 2007

One is always tempted to view the Communist order, as it exists in Russia today, as something essentially static. But Communism does not differ from other orders: it is subject to the same eroding process of time.The Communists themselves firmly believe that the ‘contradictions’ inherent in the capitalist order are insoluble, and that, sooner or later, they are bound to bring about the downfall and disintegration of the bourgeois society. They admit the existence of certain conflicts in their own society, but claim that these conflicts are merely the natural outcome of the eternal struggle between old and new elements. A closer scrutiny of these conflicts reveals, I think, that their character is far more serious than the Communists would be prepared to admit. Indeed they constitute a grave danger to the continuation of the regime as we know it. Four of these conflicts—one in the sphere of foreign policy and three in that of domestic affairs—may be usefully considered.The contradiction which exists in the field of foreign policy is a comparatively simple one. The Soviet Union tries to pursue two contradictory aims at one and the same time, that of expansion and that of isolation.The expansion is an essential element of the Communist doctrine of the world revolution. This expansion requires a great number of Soviet citizens to be stationed abroad. Their stay abroad implies close acquaintance with the outside world} the penetration of certain ideas and attitudes alien to their original Communist attitudes. At the same time, ever since 1948 at least, perhaps even earlier, there has been the doctrine of isolationism, the doctrine that the bourgeois world, the non-Soviet world, is an evil thing against which the citizens of the Soviet Empire ought to be guarded.
The Finaly Case and the Church
Authors: Hill Roland 
Published: July 2007

No event has so stirred up the dormant forces of anti-clericalism, anti-semitism and nationalism in post-war France as has the recent Affaire Finaly. The fate of two Jewish children, Robert and Gerard Finaly, who were baptised and taken to Spain by their Catholic protectors when the court had ordered that they should be given up to their Jewish relatives, have become a national scandal comparable to the Dreyfus affair. The Church and individual Catholics have been the targets of bitter attacks in the French press and radio, and the old cleavage between Catholic and anti-Catholic Frenchmen, barely healed in the last war and in the changed political atmosphere since 1945, seems to have opened up again.The facts of the case are briefly these: The Jewish doctor, Fritz Finaly, and his wife, who had found refuge in France after the Nazi occupation of Austria, were arrested in Grenoble by the Gestapo on February 14, 1944. They were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where they were killed in the gas chamber. Shortly before their deportation they had entrusted their two children, then aged two and three years, to the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul. The mother superior of that convent was unable to keep them and approached the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion who handed the children to Mlle Brun, the head of the municipal orphanage, who was already hiding ten other Jewish children.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Congar Yves 
Published: July 2007

The following article is concerned with discovering a basis for a more mature spiritual life, especially in the case of men. Three different viewpoints are successively adopted, from each of which man’s development is traced from childhood, through adolescence to complete maturity; at each stage far-reaching changes are seen to take place, and about the age of forty to forty-five a crisis normally occurs, which we shall have to discuss in some detail.A child is utterly self-centred, though his charm and simplicity prevent this from shocking us as it would in a grown-up. In his actions he always aims at getting his own way, which to a large extent means satisfying his physical needs.As he grows into a youth he enters into fuller possession of his mental and physical powers. He is haunted by the spirit of adventure and by vague ambitions (ambition itself, less generous, comes only later), for there seems no limit to what he is able to do. But for all his openness of heart he remains somewhat self-centred; it is the things that will allow him to live his own life, with his own personality, that he is striving after.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

One of the pastoral problems which loom very large in these days is that of the Catholics who, having entered upon a marriage which the Church cannot recognise as such, then find themselves tortured in mind by their consequent separation from the sacramental life of the Church, and long to return to it but see no way of doing so. What is to be done for them? How are they to be advised?It is as useless as it is heartless to say simply that they have only themselves to blame: that they sinned in contracting a marriage which is no marriage at all, and that the Church will receive them back when, and only when, they renounce it. In practice this is harmful, since it may well drive them completely and finally away from the Church. In theory it is bad theology, because it simplifies what is in reality complex, and refuses to face all the facts of a human situation. Ethics is not an exact science, precisely because its business is with the complexities and untidiness of human action in the concrete; and indeed the ultimate ethical judgment, as to what A is to do here and now, is not a question of science merely but of art, the art of prudence. We might well recall here some wise words of M. Maritain: ‘Some people imagine that morality measures our actions, not in the light of the just human ends which they ought to be aiming at in the given circumstances, but by a forest of abstract formulae which life must copy like a book. ... In reality the principles of morals are not theorems or idols: they are the supreme rules governing a concrete activity the aim of which is something to be done in certain definite circumstances, and governing it through more proximate rules and above all through the rules, which are never set down in advance, of the virtue of prudence. . . . They do not seek to devour human life; they are there to build it up.
Second Thoughts on the Priest‐Workers
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

In recent times no Catholic subject has attracted such widespread attention as the affair of the priest-workers in France. The various phases of the negotiations between the French Hierarchy and the Vatican were widely reported in the English press; in one week the matter was discussed in a leader in the Manchester Guardian, in an article in the New Statesman and in a talk on the Third Programme. Some commentators seemed to see in it an attempt by the Church in France to revolt against the dominance of the Vatican, on the principle that if you scratch a French bishop you find a Gallican; others seemed to feel that the episode revealed the Church (in France as elsewhere) in its true colours as anti-worker; others yet again insinuated that a halt had to be called to the desertions that were taking place from the ranks of the priest-workers to the Communists. Yet to appreciate the recent decisions of the French bishops, the priest-workers must be seen in the context of the whole problem of the Church and the workers in France, and of the worker apostolate which existed long before the experiment of the priest-workers was begun. In other words, the directives issued by the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops to the leaders of worker Catholic Action in October are as significant as the new instructions regarding the position of priest-workers.The picture is falsified unless the priest-worker is seen as part of the whole worker apostolate and that against the background of the growth of social Catholicism in France.
Latin American
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

Latin America accounts for more than a third of the world’s Catholic population but for less than nine per cent of the world’s priests. The disproportion between these figures is the cardinal factor in the religious situation of a vast area almost wholly Catholic in nominal allegiance but which today presents one of the most urgent of the Church’s missionary problems.The evidence of statistics is never the whole of any story, but the facts are so grave and their significance so little appreciated that this weakening of the Church’s essential function in South America must be further illustrated. It is usually assumed that a proportion of one priest to a thousand faithful is the barest minimum for assuring the Church’s basic ministrations. (In countries predominantly Protestant the ratio is much higher. Thus England and Wales have a proportion of one priest to about 450, the United States one to 622.) For the whole of Latin America the proportion is one to 7,000, with considerable variations in the different republics. (In Chile it is one to 3,000; in Argentina one to 4,750; in Brazil one to 8,000; in Honduras one to 10,350; in Guatemala one to 28,000.) The effective ministry of the priests there are (and in most countries many are in any case old) is hindered above all by the brute facts of geography. Thus in Venezuela a population of 4,500,000 is served by 800 priests, of whom 160 are at work in the diocese of Caracas alone. The remaining 640 are dispersed through a territory six times the size of France.
Rhyme and Reason
Authors: Davie Ian 
Published: July 2007

A Poem provides an enclosed domain for investigation, challenging the critic to discover how it is constructed, how its formal structure is related to the complex effect it gives, how metrical means are related to poetic ends. Although kinship of form provides the critic with a positive basis for comparison in the treatment of different poems, the emphasis seems now to have shifted from the study of a poem’s shared and inherited qualities to the study of what is distinctive or typical of the age in which it is written; as a result, little attention is paid to the diversity of poetic forms—distinct, vital and active in themselves—working in the minds of many different poets independently, towards the same kind of poetic result.Yet the fixed poetic forms and prescribed measures have a sort of philosophic beauty of their own. The poet must commit his feelings to their determination within some chosen form. The nature of his material sets a problem to be solved, and the solution is the poetic ordering of that material: he will, therefore, imagine each effect in relation to the technical means necessary for its accomplishment, by so distributing his rhymes, for example, that the emphasis derived from rhyme in one part is exactly neutralized by a similar concentration upon another.The subject-matter of a poem exercises a remote control over the poet’s choice of words, and its form an immediate control, the metrical scheme tightening the interpretation of the grammar. Words have certain degrees of elevation in the scale of language.
Bilingualism and the Schools of Wales
Authors: Foster Idris 
Published: July 2007

It is laid down in Section 4(i) of the Education Act 1944 that ‘there shall be two Central Advisory Councils for Education, one for England and the other for Wales and Monmouthshire, and it shall be the duty of those Councils to advise the Minister upon such matters connected with educational theory and practice as they think fit and upon any questions referred to them by him’.The Central Advisory Council for Wales has already published three substantial reports: they deal with the future of secondary education in Wales, with county colleges and with The place of Welsh and English in the schools of Wales. This last report, which is the result of two years of hard work, is an impressive volume and its contents merit an extended notice. By nature of its terms of reference, which include ‘the problem of bilingualism in Wales generally’, it is a document of the greatest importance not only for those who are bound to be concerned with education in Wales but also for all who feel any concern for the future of the Welsh nation.The historical setting of the problem is presented in the first two sections of the Report. The first gives a comprehensive and valuable account of the place of Welsh and English in the schools between 1650 and 1925: the former date marks the foundation of nearly sixty free schools in Wales under the ‘Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel’, and the latter was the year which saw the appointment of the Departmental Committee whose inspiring but as yet, after a quarter of a century, not fully implemented report on Welsh in Education and Life was published in 1927.
Nature and Natural Theology
Authors: Bright Laurence 
Published: July 2007

Those who consider theology worth talking about, form perhaps a very small minority in the country; but at least, apart from Marxists, or humanists at our older Universities, very few of them would still maintain that it has finally been disposed of by science. Against the background threat of total destruction, modem efforts are preferably directed to integrating what has been inherited; so it is the relation rather than the conflict of science and religion which now provides the usual theme in public lectures on those subjects. Two recent publications may exemplify this contrast of styles between old and new.There is little to show that the greater part of Professor Price’s Eddington memorial lecture was not written thirty or more years ago. Its argument begins with the claim that ‘the materialistic conception of human personality ... is accepted nowadays, almost as a matter of course, by the majority of Western educated people’. Though there is a disagreement as to the exact form materiahsm takes (Epiphenomenalism, Behaviourism, Marxism are suggested ways), it is at least certain, according to science, that ‘mental processes are inseparable from bodily ones’. Since theism, our natural knowledge of God exclusive of particular revelation (though Professor Price’s scope is wider, the essential point lies here), depends on some direct awareness of him, unmediated by the senses, it is thoroughly discredited in a scientific age. But a ray of hope shone through the general gloom on the day ‘when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a brilliant group of Cambridge men’.