bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Dialogue with Hinduism
Authors: Griffiths Bede 
Published: July 2007

The establishment of the new Secretariat for other religions in Rome is a sign of a new approach within the Catholic Church. For the first time in history the Church has begun to adopt a positive attitude towards other religions. In the past the belief has been that it is the mission of the Church to ‘teach all nations’ and to convert them from ‘error’ to the knowledge of the ‘truth'. It is true that there has always been a recognition of the fact that there is truth to be found in other religions and that men can be saved in them, and this goes back to the earliest tradition of the Bible, but never before has there been an open recognition of other religions as entities with which the Church can enter into a dialogue. Just as the Secretariat for Unity has taught us to recognize Christian values in the separated Christian Churches and to enter into ecumencial relations with them, so the new Secretariat for Religions is a recognition of the fact that there are religious values in other religions and opens the way to an ecumenical dialogue with them as corporate bodies or institutions.This new attitude is due, no doubt, primarily to the changed condition of the world. For the first time in history the great religions of the world have come into global contact with one another and have begun to confront one another with mutual understanding.
The Quality of ‘Mercy’
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

This article is not about mercy, but about ‘mercy', the English word. This word is the stock translation in religious texts of the Latin word misericordia. My contention is going to be that the quality of ‘mercy’ is far too strained to stand for misericordia; that not only is it an inadequate word to translate the Latin word, it is – more seriously – an insufficient word to convey the full Christian, religious thing. And as this thing, as this value is practically at the heart of the Christian gospel, the good news of God to man, the use of an insufficient and hence misleading word to represent it can have very unfortunate consequences indeed. But with these I am not here concerned. My interest is in finding the best English word or words for translating misericordia in liturgical texts. And my way of doing this is going to be by putting ‘mercy’ on trial.Misericordia, it scarcely needs saying, appears so often in liturgical texts because it appears so often in the Bible. Two other Latin words appear frequently in its company, the related noun miseratio, usually in the plural miserationes, and the related verb misereor. The first weakness of the English ‘mercy’ is shown by the fact that it does duty, either by itself or in a phrase like ‘have mercy', for all three of these Latin words.
Must one always Obey the Laws?
Authors: McDermott Timothy 
Published: July 2007

The question I have been asked is: Must one always obey the laws? The first thing to say is that clearly this is not a legal question. By that I mean that you cannot answer the question by saying: but the law says you must. For then your questioner comes back with: and why must I obey that law ? The situation is rather like that of the pilot of a plane or the captain of a ship. The crew and passengers do not obey the pilot or the captain merely because he tells them to. Nor do they do it simply because he is a powerful man and would make them sorry if they didn't. Rather they obey him because they think he has a right to tell them what to do. He has the right because he holds a position of authority. Obeying a government is so like the situation of obeying a pilot, that in fact the word government derives from the Latin word for steering a ship. One obeys a government not simply because of its power, but because of its authority; and it does not get this authority simply by saying that it has it. You do not obey laws simply because the laws say that you must. Why then do you ?We might ask what gives the captain of a ship his position of authority. There are two answers to this, because there are two questions hidden in it. If we mean, how did it come about that this particular man is filling this position of authority, then the answer would be that he was chosen by the legally approved methods.
Theology and History
Authors: Richards Michael 
Published: July 2007

The interpretation of the historical process is now a major academic industry. Just as we have bibliographies of bibliographies, we have histories of historical writing. Indeed, the day is not far distant when, in history as in metaphysics, the third degree of abstraction will triumphantly be reached: a history of histories of history. The historians, those who of all men should be urging most strongly a return to the sources, are also those who lead us to the most rarefied heights of speculation about our nature and destiny. The field of history should be for ever unenclosed, and be a free breathing-space for a pallid population well nigh stifled with the fumes of philosophy.’ In the forty years since Augustine Birrell wrote The Muse of History, the Green Belt has become a built-up area; the pallid population now suffocates in libraries beneath the weight of reviews and journals whose learned footnotes tantalize with hints and glimpses of pastures long submerged.When the theologian ventures on to this scene, the historian may well despair. Understandably, he hesitates before subscribing to Professor Toynbee's declaration that history passes over into theology. ‘It is a bad habit in historians to take at their face value the hysterical exaggerations of the pulpit'; it is also a bad habit to turn to first causes when secondary ones will do. That may be why ecclesiastical history is reckoned a soft option by those academics who rate hard-headedness as highly as any man of business.
Liberty of Speech in the Church
Authors: Smith Jerome 
Published: July 2007

The Church has always demanded free speech for herself. Faith is obedience given to God through hearing and obeying the preached Word of God; and for that preaching no human authorization is necessary or even possible, but only a mission from God. ‘How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed ? Or how shall they believe him of whom they have not heard ? And how shall they hear without a preacher ? And how shall they preach unless they be sent?’ (Rom. 10.14). If freedom to preach is not granted by the secular authorities, then they are to be ignored, and the necessary freedom to speak is to be exercized, whatever the cost. Peter's defence still stands: ‘We ought to obey God rather than man’ (Acts 5.28).From the times of the apostles onwards the Church has never hesitated over this basic freedom of speech which she must claim for herself. There has been greater unsureness over whether others should enjoy a like freedom. The weight of history has left the Church with an apparently negative approach to toleration in matters of religion or morals. But the publication of Pacem in Terris brought a new note, with the customary openness and optimism of ail Pope John's utterances. ‘By the natural law every human being has the right... to freedom in searching for truth and in expressing and communicating his opinions . . . within the limits laid down by the moral order and the common good; and he has the right to be informed truthfully about public events. . . Every human being has the right to honour God according to the dictates of an upright conscience, and therefore to worship God both in private and in public’.
How Corrupt is the Church?
Authors: Dummett Michael 
Published: July 2007

Nothing is more important than that Catholics should continually ask themselves: how bad a state is the Church in? We are all aware of the possibility that the Church may appear to be corrupt, and of the actualization of this possibility at various times in the past. But we tend, I think, to assume that such corruption will always be glaringly obvious, a matter of simony at the papal court, or pluralist bishops, or priests with concubines and children : we therefore conclude that, to the extent that things seem all right, so they must be all right. Whereas in fact, I suspect, corruption is seldom easily recognized at the time. Perhaps even the examples I have just mentioned, which seem to us so scandalous, were not felt at the time as symptoms of deep-seated disease: after all, we know that the Church is composed, not of angels, but of men, and that we have no right to expect perfection from Christians, bishops included; so probably these things were usually put down as instances of the kind of human weakness that we know that we have to reckon with. Thus we must be prepared, at any time, to find that the Church can be deeply corrupted, a corruption for which we shall be sternly judged but to which we have long been blind.When we have recognized that the Church can be corrupt, we have to enquire what could make it possible for this corruption to take place: and this is the most serious theological enquiry that can be made, for it concerns our understanding of the nature of the Church.
Education and the Growth of Conscience
Authors: Tidmarsh Mannes 
Published: July 2007

Consciences are neither born nor made, they develop. Development in living beings is the outcome of interaction between the individual and the environment; specifically, in the case of moral development, between the individual person and the culture. The child is born with the potential ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms other than those of immediate personal satisfaction to which the infant is limited, but the growing child can make assessments only in terms of the values which he is taught. He has. as part of his human make-up, the tendency to pursue the perceived good and to shun the perceived bad. What he actually perceives as good and bad depends largely on what the society into which he is born teaches him so to perceive. This is not to say that the individual's capacity for moral judgment is wholly dependent on the influence of external agents; the ultimate structure of conscience is unique because no two environments are entirely alike and no two individuals are entirely alike.Though it has been said that moral development is the result of interaction between the individual and the culture one must be yet more precise. The child receives his values not from ‘the culture’ or from ‘ ‘society’ in a large and undefined sense but from a fairly circumscribed group of persons: parents and siblings, other adults in the family circle, school teachers and companions. This means that values are never transmitted to the child in a ‘pure’ state, they are always, in some way. modified by the person who mediates them.
A Theology of Death
Authors: Barrett Paul 
Published: July 2007

All theology springs from the fact that man, faced with a revelation that makes certain demands upon him, finds that at the same time he must accept the demands of his own humanity and of his life in the world. The reason is that man cannot accept revealed truth without submitting it to interpretation by his reason, in terms of truths he knows as a rational thinker. A man finds that he cannot be true to revelation unless he is true to himself as a man in the world.And revelation is a very wide concept. Some revealed truths are not immediately concerned with matters of ordinary human experience. Of such a kind is the revelation of the Trinity. There is no particular rational factor that would automatically make us tend to interpret this truth in one way rather than in another. Other revealed truths however are concerned with matters of ordinary experience, and so experience itself provides a framework for a rational interpretation of the revealed truth, enabling us to accept the revealed truth as running parallel, so to speak, with the truth we have learned for ourselves. Where revelation concerns death, for instance, we have an example of this kind of ‘ready-made’ interpretation being used. Because death in our human experience means that particular event which is the termination of life in the world, we are inclined to think of death, where the word occurs in statements of revealed truth, as that event.
Language Structure and Moral Education
Authors: Nichols K. F. 
Published: July 2007

My theme is really the Socratic proposition that knowledge is virtue. This is an idea which is never far from the minds of those concerned either with literature or with education. Yet when we look into our own lives, the proposition seems obviously false. We know from our own experience the truth of video meliora proboque. deteriora sequor. Most Catholics moreover, have been brought up to venerate (rightly but perhaps for the wrong reasons), sancta simp/icitas. the faith of a Breton peasant; to feel that a lot of learning is a dangerous thing, and that nothing good ever came out of Cambridge – at least not since the time of St John Fisher.Nevertheless we can see that there is something in the proposition, at any rate negatively. If it is not true that virtue necessarily accompanies knowledge, it is commonly true that crime accompanies ignorance. Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday School movement, wrote of the prisoners in Gloucester gaol for whom he was working in the 1770's; ‘extreme ignorance was the principal cause of those enormities which brought them into this deplorable situation, precluding all hope of any lasting or real amendment from their punishment'. The uneducated classes a hundred years ago were still referred to as the ‘criminal classes', and it remains true today that those social areas where education is least successful are also those where delinquency is most common. Ignorance is, in modern Western society anyway, at least a contributory cause of crime, and education, if not a cure for crime, would at any rate create, as Jeanne Hirsch said of politics, a vacuum within which something is possible.
American Jews and Vatican II
Authors: McCabe Bernard 
Published: July 2007

When Pope Paul came to New York last October and said Mass in Yankee Stadium, before a congregation of 40,000 and a hidden audience of untold million television-viewers, he made a special point, no doubt because he was in the world’s most Jewish city, of extending his blessing to ‘the sons of Abraham’. The Mass he said was the Votive Mass for Peace, which has a Gospel beginning: ‘Late in the evening that same day, the first day of the week, although the doors of the place where the disciples had gathered were bolted for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood before them and said: “Peace be to you!” (John 20.19-20). For days afterwards one could meet Jews saying: ‘So that’s what we mean, that’s exactly what we mean’. Quite a few Catholics were bothered about it too (e.g. an angry Jesuit letter to The National Catholic Reporter: ‘unthinking acceptance of scriptural readings chosen long ago by unskilled hands’). The incident with all its sensitiveness and misunderstandings on both sides, was typical enough of the atmosphere in which the ‘Schema on the Jews’ was received in the U.S.A.Ever since the close of the second session the American Jewish press had given prominent space to articles and news reports echoing widely current rumours about the strength of the forces in or near the Vatican opposing a definitive statement on anti-Semitism.
Conscience Emergent
Authors: Drinkwater F. H. 
Published: July 2007

It is not often in this country that the official or semi-official Catholic line on controversial questions receives the close attention devoted to it in Mr Walter Stein’s formidable article in the November Blackfriars. Its subject (the reader will recall) was nuclear weapons and the morality of their possession and use. There-may-well-exist-possible-lawful-targets; We-should-leave-it-to-our-governments-and-experts: H-bombs-are-just-the-counters-of-diplomacy; Possessing-them – is – only – an – occasion – of – sin – which – a – good – intention – could – render-remote; Do-not-we-need-an-up-to-date-ethics-of-bluffing ?Any-how-was-Hiroshima-so-very-different-from-Dresden ? All these recent instances of casuistry (when the need was for witness) inside and outside of the Council, on the part of prelates, theologians and editors, were patiently examined by Mr Stein; and he had no difficulty in showing their ‘appalling irrelevance’ in face of the ‘massively murderous commitments here and now’, the existence of which all the Catholic nuclear apologists admit though boggling at the idea that Christians should do anything practical about the situation beyond favouring disarmament by general consent. It is all very criminal and crazy (say our official Catholic representatives in effect) but there is nothing that a Christian can do about it beyond what any atheist or communist can do and is indeed doing already.If that is the situation at least for us in Britain and U.S.A., the question arises urgently: why the boggling? Why have Catholics become so helplessly habituated to what our critic calls a falsely-prudent ‘legalist lifemanship’, a ‘diet of casuistic pusillanimities’ ? One tempting explanation might be a kind of irresponsibility; a serious layman might imagine he saw in the clergy (high or low) an inability to face realities, an almost charming immaturity as of schoolboys who do not grow up, for whom loyalties mean more than truth or justice.
Fear in South Africa
Authors: Hindmarsh Roland 
Published: July 2007

It is disturbing to realize how little the educated reading public knows about Africa, in spite of the fact that this continent has rarely been out of the news for the past decade. Reporters in the daily press, as well as columnists in the weeklies, may perhaps be excused for paying attention principally to rapid change or abnormality, since they take this to be their function. Perhaps too the reading public, however educated it may be, has been conditioned to expect the spectacular and the violent; the main features of living, largely constant, shifting only gradually in character and emphasis, do not make news.There was something very distasteful about the way Ghana’s preparations for independence were watched by the daily press; it was clear that reporters expected a disaster when Africans took over the government of a state after so much shorter a period of tutelage than had been given to India and Pakistan. ‘Barely a lifetime of British rule.’ people found themselves thinking, ‘it’s bound to lead to civil strife, and the collapse of order. Then I suppose we’ll have to go in again to clear up the mess’. But the Ashanti people didn’t revolt; Ghana has remained internally at peace, though the methods she has used have caused dismay in Britain. This dismay need in many cases not have arisen. If some newspapers had tried more conscientiously to give an account of the social and cultural forces that made two-party democracy an unsuitable, in fact an unstable, form of government in Africa at the present time, readers would have been less alarmed or less despondent about the collapse of parliamentary opposition in one country after another.
What is Politics About?
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard 
Published: July 2007

This note is provoked by some recent discussions in New Blackfriars and elsewhere, which have been about making the presence of Christ effective in the world in terms of social justice. It is not enough, we are rightly told, to preach in a vacuum; a pointless activity if no-one is listening. Social action means, if it is to go beyond isolated individual benevolence, political action: the point is made both in the Editorial and in Mr Eagleton’s article in the December 1965 number. In a general way, I agree with this position, but there seem to me several implications in it that need to be examined.In the first place, should we not be careful to avoid the kind of implicitly totalitarian attitude that gives supreme importance to the political order at the expense of every other kind of human activity? One recalls Nkrumah’s amiable motto: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom . . .’ On the whole, one would have thought Christians would avoid this particular trap, but I can imagine some eager Christian radicals, so intoxicated with the discovery that in battling in the political arena they are doing Christ’s work, that they exaggerate the importance of that particular way of doing it. On a basis of respect for persons, one needs to recognise that there are many admirable people in this world, who contribute a great deal to society, but to whom politics means nothing at all: many, but by no means all, of them are women.
No Fear, But Some Reproach
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

‘The king kisses the hands of my lady Abbess’, rang the cry across the convent walls. The year, 1602, and the occasion, a hunting trip made by Henri IV in the neighbourhood of the Cistercian foundation of Port-Royal. The abbess in question was just eleven years old, and pattens had to be found for her to stand on to receive the king properly. It was not the abbess he came to see, though, but her father, Antoine Amauld, who to all intents and purposes controlled the abbey of Port Royal. His daughter, Jacqueline, was only nine when she took her vows in October, 1600, though the request addressed to Rome for her to be made at once coadjutrix of the abbess described her as seventeen. Under these inauspicious circumstances of flagrant royal patronage and deception of the papal authority began the startling career of Angélique Arnauld and the two institutions of Port-Royal which were the most significant phenomena in the religious history of the ‘great century’ in France.It is useful to be reminded how this purest of all the religious movements of the seventeenth century began in an atmosphere of simony and corruption, because it goes some way to explain the lazy monastic ideal against which Mère Angélique, a very vigorous, shrewd and forthright French version of St Teresa of Avila, later rebelled, and it also gives us some inkling of the family strength of the Arnaulds and their connections, which enabled Port-Royal to stand up to the Archbishop of Paris and the royal incursions under Louis XIV as long as it did.
Abortion and the Psychiatrist
Authors: Spencer Seymour 
Published: July 2007

The Catholic psychiatrist can justly feel that the Ramsey Committee’s findings are likely to make harder rather than easier his present work in the moral setting in which he conceives it: because mainly of the indeterminate, even muddled, attitude taken up by the Committee towards the status of the foetus and the psychiatric possibilities in the mother; because secondarily no understanding is shown of the present difficulties of the Catholic psychiatrist confronted with the demand for termination.In speaking thus frankly, there is no intention to impugn the Committee’s breadth of vision, constructive desire or sincerity. The writer has the Committee’s chairman, Professor Ramsey, as a personal friend and wise and far-seeing administrative colleague. Acquainted also with the other two Oxford dons on the Committee, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, and with the Committee’s psychiatrist, Portia Holman, he knows all three of them for their humane concern. These characteristics pervade the Report. The first two chapters sum up admirably the reasons for the present importance of abortion; the history of British legislative concern for the question abutting in the two currently relevant statutes and their successful assailment by Alec Bourne, the gynaecologist; and that of Christian canonical concern from Tertullian onwards, including the period of distinction (never, it seems, one of essential nature but only of ground for varying the penalty for infanticide), between foetus animatus and foetus inanimatus. The Committee concludes Chapter II with the affirmation that the subject is a proper concern for the law on the primary ground, which any Catholic will endorse, that every human being has the right to life unless his unlawful act forfeits it.