bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Martin De Porres: Lay‐Brother (1579–1639)
Authors: Ryan Columba 
Published: July 2007

There is so sharp a glare of the miraculous about Blessed I Martin of Lima, and sometimes such a haze of mere emotionalism, that it is hard to see the man as he was, the hard-working, patiently enduring Dominican lay-brother in the flesh. What follows is an attempt to depict him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and is based on ten of the seventy-six accounts given twenty years after his death at the Diocesan enquiry by people who knew him.The background needs to be realised: a huge old Spanish-style convent, its several hundred religious occupied in all the work needed in a city of the New World: preaching, teaching, care of orphans, children, poor, sick. Lima, even when Martin died at the age of sixty, had existed a bare hundred years, a city of Spanish immigrants or first descendants of the conquistadores, merchants, soldiers, religious of every description. Side by side with these lived the dispossessed Indians, the imported Negro slaves. In the priory were not only religious, but the boys they looked after, and men staying there on retreat or learning a trade. There were Negro servants in the kitchen and the laundry and at all the menial tasks in the place. The Dominicans themselves comprised priests, student-novices (from fourteen and upwards), lay-brothers, and donados (not strictly religious, but ‘familiars’ living in the house). They had their cells; not necessarily small rooms, but places with alcoves and closets off them shared by visitors and children.
Personality in History
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

The title of this essay requires immediate modification. In fact it is concerned with one cultural movement, one historic process, which in spite of constant and recurring crises may be termed continuous. The so-called civilisation of the West,—Mediterranean in origin, and now, at least in a superficial and technological sense, world-wide in extent—provides its historical background. The purpose of the essay is to view the history of this culture in terms of personality.Two questions at once suggest themselves: What is meant by history? and What is personality? By history is here meant an interpretative inquiry concerned with human activity—a description derived from Collingwood, but not understood in quite the same way. This description has at least the value that it forces the mind to consider the second question. For what is human activity but the exteriorisation of mental and moral processes which have their root in the person? No sooner has this been asserted than a doubt arises: What is meant by saying that human activity is the activity of a person?
Catholics and The Labour Party
Authors: Walsh R. P. 
Published: July 2007

For good or for ill there is every chance that the Labour Party will control the destiny of this country for perhaps fifty out of the next hundred years, and as it is a party that attracts strong support from a large proportion of the Catholics in this country it is important to think of the position of these Catholics within it. In the major industrial centres the majority of Catholics in the working class support Labour; indeed, it was once estimated in the columns of this review by Lord Pakenham that eighty per cent of the Catholic body voted Labour, and even if we agree that this figure is high, the percentage must still be very significant.Unfortunately most of those Catholics with the ability to write and to project their ideas into the world of thought and of literature tend to be supporters of the Conservative Party, and they in no way represent the general opinion of the Catholic body. When one moves at what might be called the national level of Catholic action one finds that most of the leaders are also Conservative. No one can doubt the right of these writers or leaders to follow the politics they hold, nor can one doubt their ability to write and their ability to give time to the leadership of the Catholic body. They accomplish a magnificent job for the Catholic community, yet it is unfortunate that so one-sided an impression is given of the Catholic attitude towards our political parties.
The Natural Law
Authors: Flynn Thomas Edward 
Published: July 2007

The controversy roused by the Pope’s address last autumn to Italian obstetricians was at its height when on a Sunday evening I sat listening to the second of Lord Radcliffe’s Reith Lectures. His scholarly exposition of the natural law seemed to silence the din of ill-informed and sentimental criticism which had assailed the Holy Father’s calm and authoritative statement of moral judgments which were the ordinary teaching of the Church. It was not that Lord Radcliffe stood forth as a champion of natural law; the pleasure one felt was due merely to this reminder of a concept which had been the corner-stone of ethics for a millennium. For the attack on the Pope’s teaching in this particular allocution, like the modem propaganda in favour of birth control and euthanasia, of divorce and artificial insemination, was made in ignorance or in contempt of that fundamental law of nature which in fact governs most of these grave problems. That law goes almost unrecognised outside the Catholic Church. It seems opportune, therefore, to introduce this series of articles in Blackfriars with an account of the natural law and its relationship with law in general.The word ‘law’ is used in a variety of senses today. It may mean the decree of a legislator, usually the human ruler, regulating the external conduct of the human subject; or it may mean a scientific law, like the law of gravitation, which is regarded as merely the expression of the behaviour of inanimate objects as discerned by a process of induction from observation and experiment.But the medieval mind took a wider sweep, and subsumed under the name ‘law’ all these various meanings. First of all it considered the eternal law which was the plan of the all-wise Creator for the harmonious progress of the whole universe of his creation.
Play
Authors: Nicholl Donald 
Published: July 2007

There is an interesting little paragraph in St Thomas Aquinas’ works which refers to play. He has been describing how every action is performed towards some end, with some aim in view. Then he breaks off, and says that there are some actions which do not seem to be for any end, such as contemplating, playing—stroking one’s beard! Leaving aside the beard-stroking (which St Thomas accounts for as would a modem analyst), he sees close similarities between contemplation and play. That is to say, contemplation does not have any end outside itself, because it is its own end; likewise with play, for although we sometimes play so as to study better afterwards, we also play for the sheer delight which is in the game itself. Therefore there is obviously a close similarity between the playful and the contemplative attitudes: they have no end outside themselves.St Thomas begins an exposition of Boethius by quoting from the book of Ecclesiasticus (XXXII, 15) where man is told on rising to run first to his home, and there recollect himself and play. St Thomas uses the quotation to explain that he is undertaking this exposition because to contemplate wisdom (the recollection) is itself a delightful game which requires no exterior aim for its justification. Furthermore, he points out, the Scriptures themselves compare the divine wisdom to the delight of play, for in Proverbs VIII, 30, we hear how ‘I was with him forming all things; and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times’. In view of which one is not surprised to discover St Thomas saying that a man may commit sin by not playing sufficiendy.
Justice and the Laws
Authors: Slesser Henry 
Published: July 2007

In the famous treatise on The Laws of England by Blackstone, published in four large volumes in 1769, there are but two pages devoted to the natural law and the law of nations. It is interesting in these days, when English judges and professors are apt to deride the whole conception of natural law or any law beyond the customary and the legislative, to see how far already the abandonment of any eternal or moral juridical reference had proceeded even in Blackstone’s day. His acknowledgement, perfunctory and abbreviated as it is, constitutes almost the last reference to any juridical principle (beyond parliamentary democratic desire), to govern the making or interpretation of laws in England: the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament has become unchallengeable.Yet, under the heading ‘Of the nature of Laws in general’ Blackstone still writes:Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being; and as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker’s will, —which will is called the Law of Nature; and there are three great principles of this law, namely,—that we should live reputably, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due; and to these three principles Justinian has, in fact, reduced the whole doctrine of law.The constitution and frame of humanity afford a striking proof of the benevolence of the Creator,—the laws of eternal justice being inseparably interwoven with the happiness of every individual; and the human reason not sufficing, of itself, to teach this law, therefore the beneficence of the Deity has aided the imperfection of human reason by an immediate and direct revelation, this revealed law being declared by the Holy Scriptures; and upon these two foundations, nature and revelation, depend all human laws.
After Coulton
Authors: Chew Helena M. 
Published: July 2007

It is rather more than thirty years since Dr G. G. Coulton inaugurated the series of ‘Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’. In the interval between the two great wars a number of notable books appeared, including Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries and Coulton’s own monumental Five Centuries of Religion, of which the recently-published posthumous volume appropriately terminated the series. It is now revived, under the general editorship of the Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge, ‘to present as a single collection some of the work submitted for higher degrees or fellowships by young Cambridge medievalists’. Thus it will provide in some sense a parallel to the Oxford Historical Series.The first two volumes to appear in the new series are both studies of ecclesiastical estates, and so carry on the tradition established by the late R. A. L. Smith in his Canterbury Cathedral Priory. Mr Edward Miller’s subject is the abbey and bishopric of Ely; while Mr H. P. R. Finberg writes on Tavistock Abbey. In both cases, however, the ecclesiastical is strictly subordinate to the ‘social’ interest.Mr Miller makes no excursions into the field of diocesan administration, but defines his aim as ‘to draw out of the records of the Church of Ely some deductions about the progress of the lordship exercised by the abbots and bishops of Ely, and about the influence they exercised upon those fragments of medieval society which they had some real power to shape’. Mr Finberg, as he tells us in his preface, is concerned with Tavistock less as a community of men dedicated to the religious life than as ‘an economic unit, a property-owning organisation, a producer and consumer’, seen against the background of that part of Devon in which the estates of the abbey lay.
Four Challenges to Religion
Authors: White Victor 
Published: July 2007

Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.’ Freud’s famous utterance, tom from its context like that, had all the makings of a slogan. Whether we liked it, or found it thoroughly offensive, it was—like the one about the ‘opium of the people’—difficult, impossible to forget. Whether or not it wins our rational assent, it ‘rings a bell’ of some sort, there is (we feel) ‘something in it’. It will probably survive when the book in which it appeared is quite forgotten. It has already survived devastating criticism of its own premisses.Freud’s critique of religion, perhaps reflected indirectly, perhaps thoroughly misunderstood and distorted, is part of our modem heritage. Believers or unbelievers, we can hardly have escaped its impact. Comparatively few can have studied, tested, examined it for themselves, but it can be all the more impressive for that. This was no case of a specialist trespassing outside his own field to express opinions on subjects about which he is no authority. When Freud said religion was a neurosis, he was presumably talking about what he knew. He was a pioneer discoverer of causes and cures of neurosis.An obsession of humanity or not, religion was certainly something like an obsession with Freud himself. The subject seems to have fascinated him; in his books he can never leave it alone for very long. Perhaps it is ungracious to subject Freud’s writings to his own technique of psycho-analytic investigation, yet it is difficult to avoid doing so; and we begin to suspect that his anxious, sometimes tortuous, theorising about religion tells us more about Freud than religion. But that is hardly our business; we must consider what he says on its own merits, rather than his private motives for saying it. And it may be worth while to reset the slogan in its original context.
A Note on Religion as a Perspective
Authors: Sarmiento Edward 
Published: July 2007

An essential aspect of Ortega’s philosophical outlook is his theory of perspectivism. According to this, every activity, every philosophy, for that matter, every individual point of view, constitutes a unique and irreplaceable perspective on reality. With this in mind, we may examine the following paragraph from one of his most fundamental works, En torno a Galileo (1933), in which he studies the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and from Christianity to rationalism:It is possible that in making this matter clear to ourselves we may discover that the confusion of the scientific perspective with the vital perspective is not without its inconvenience; it is a false perspective just as it was false to make of the religious, theological perspective the vital perspective. We shall see, in fact, how life does not tolerate being supplanted by either revealed faith or pure reason. For that reason the crisis of the Renaissance was brought about, for that reason a new crisis, dark, enigmatic, has opened before us.(Obras completas, V, 66-67; italics mine.)I think that, carefully considered, there may be no objection to make to this view. The fundamental desire of man is life—life is the only thing which, in the logic of which man is capable, is without an ulterior justification: life justifies itself. All values, truth, goodness, beauty, justify themselves by the objective requirement of their external correlative and by the subjective demand of the human nature which creates them in the sense of acknowledging them. Truth acquires its raison d’être by the obligation it is under, in order to be itself, to conform to the reality it describes and because the man who utters it is unable (in the simplest meaning of the words) to live without truth.
Four Challencges to Religion
Authors: White Victor 
Published: July 2007

It may seem odd to count the psychology of C. G. Jung as a challenge to religion. It is more usual to complain that, as Freud doffed the physician’s coat for the professor’s gown, so Jung, still more incongruously, has assumed the clergyman’s surplice—if not the robes of the magician, the prophet, the mystagogue. Yet I think that the friendliness of Jung presents a far more serious and radical challenge to religion as we know it than did ever the hostility of Freud.For Freud, religion was an obsessional neurosis. For Jung it seems to be rather the absence of religion that is at the root of most present-day neurosis among adults. Already in 1932 he wrote: ‘During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. . . . Among all my patients in the second half of life (that is to say, over thirty-five) there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers.’How did it come about, this diametrically opposite evaluation of religion—by two psychologists who once worked together in close harmony and considerable mutual admiration? Their early differences, on the surface at least, had nothing whatever to do with religion or philosophy. Jung was every bit as sceptical of both as was Freud. Theirs were wholly professional differences, concerned with the interpretation of actual psychological facts, and with what was, and was not, therapeutically successful.The coming rift was already visible in Jung’s Wandltmgen und Symbole der Libido, written in 1911. Jung still accepted, even stressed, Freud’s ideas about the origin, and the illusoriness, of religion. But he recognised that traditional religious beliefs and practices (whatever else they may have been) had in fact functioned as a sort of mass-therapy, or at least as a preventive against the sort of neuroses that afflict modem man.
John O'Connor
Authors: Albert S. M. 
Published: July 2007

When Monsignor John O’Connor slept peacefully in the Lord in his eighty-second year on the day which also saw the death of his late Majesty King George the Sixth—Father John would have chuckled at the coincidence— Blackfriars and the Dominican Order lost an old and staunch friend.His first contacts with the Order are not known to the present writer, but he once quoted something which had been told him in 1894 by an old novice of Father Tom Burke. Many well- known members of the English Province were his friends, among them Fathers Bede Jarrett, Hugh Pope and Vincent McNabb. Some of them may even have been a little disconcerted and embarrassed by the familiarity with which he spoke or addressed them by their Christian names. Until the outbreak of the last war he used to invite one of the Friars to his parish every second year to conduct a parochial retreat, thus bringing the Dominican habit to a part of the world where it was otherwise seldom seen. It was unforunate that the death or absence of his friends left the Order unrepresented among the hundred-and-fifty priests who attended his funeral.Though a great admirer of the Order, he never became a tertiary. He was too much of a free-lance for that. And while he held St Thomas Aquinas in high esteem and considered himself his disciple, he could hardly be called a thomist in any strict sense of the word. Nor did he claim to be a theologian: ‘reasoning on revelation’ was how he described his ruminations and declarations on theological topics.
Infant Rights
Authors: Wayne T. G. 
Published: July 2007

When the mother’s hfe is menaced, and the birth bears a threat not a blessing, is the baby then an aggressor, and accordingly to be disposed of as neatly as possible? Intervention to that effect, is it not demanded by plain common- sense, clear responsibility, a humane scale of values? The Christian Church, however, can never consent to the direct destruction of innocent human hfe—notice the qualifications direct and innocent, through the use of force to repel aggression is approved. Nevertheless our present question, which cannot be summed up in a single brutal or sentimental statement, has been charged with anxiety and misrepresentation: on one side, the Pope has been accused of preferring the unborn baby to the mother, and of a characteristically clerical unconcern for ordinary human tragedies; on the other, materialism and paganism can be too readily ascribed to some of his critics, and their reluctance to go to extreme lengths not allowed for.Let us begin by recognising how rare is a classical case of Mother v. Child; their relations, from beginning to end, should be for the health of both, and indeed so they are, when the physical, psychological, and moral rules are observed. Women are well designed by God to be mothers. We speak of an ‘expectant’ mother; and certainly she can look forward with happy confidence to the birth of her child. The situation is not abnormal, the condition not pathological, the business not a dangerous operation. A woman when she is in labour hath pain, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.
The Black and the Red
Authors: Beales A. C. F. 
Published: July 2007

Mr Blanshard has been at it again. This time he appears in the arena astride not one adversary but two: the twin steeds of the Vatican and the Kremlin, the Black International and the Red. His thesis is that there is a triangular war going on, between Communism and Democracy and Catholic power (he implies some distinction between Catholic power, which is his chosen concern, and Catholicism, which quite evidently is not)—a struggle in which each of the three is fighting the other two simultaneously, and in which there is room for only one ultimate victor.But though in this book there are two horses in the ring,where in Freedom and Catholic Power there was one, it is really the same turn all over again. The net result is but a deeper denigration of the Catholic Church, by (this time) comparing it for three hundred pages with a Marxist institution whose blackness none of his readers except Communists will any longer doubt. The parallel is of course fascinating (there is never a dull moment): provided you are content for it to have extent without depth—for he never addresses himself to the problem of why, fundamentally, the Church execrates Atheistic Communism, nor vice versa. To him they are both primarily power machines, and anti-majority-rule. It is as easy as that. And parlous plausible.In one respect there is more restraint than last time. There is none of the bombast about nobody being able to refute a single fact or quotation. On the contrary, his preface saddles responsibility for any mistakes upon himself rather than upon his consultants: though he is freer with the names of the ex-Marxists among these than of the ex-Catholics: ‘Unfortunately it would not be wise to mention all of my friends in Italy who have helped ... to show me the seamier side of Vatican policy’.
The Fallibility of Dr Salmon
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

Many years ago, when I was unsettled about the Anglican position, I read Salmon’s Infallibility with great care. It had been recommended to me as ‘a devastatingly unanswerable criticism of the validity of the Roman claims’.Though I did not realise it then, this book was a determining factor in my decision to become a Catholic. I had read at the same time Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman and Newman’s own Essay on Development, the classical exposition in English of the doctrine of tradition. I saw at once that the infallibility which Salmon was attacking was not the infallibility which the Catholic Church claims and which had been defined with greater precision by the Vatican Council. I realised, too, that when Salmon wrote of tradition he meant something different from the tradition so clearly analysed and cogently expounded by Newman.I knew that according to Catholic theology reason can go so far as to show the consonance of revealed truth with knowledge acquired by reason, and even to infer that what is revealed is true and should be believed. The assent of faith however is supernatural and cannot be produced by such knowledge, but is wholly dependent on the word of God in revelation. It was plain that Salmon had no clear conception of this distinction and was in constant confusion about the respective functions of faith and reason.