bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Church of the Diaspora in Germany
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

It is welcome news that the United States has agreed to consider the possibility of allowing East German refugees to enter America as immigrants, and that the Canadian Government has given an assurance that it will assist in giving East German farmers in particular new homes and places of work. For the problem of the twelve million refugees, swollen every month by thousands of fresh arrivals from the Russian Zone, is still one of the most important of all European questions. The plight of the D.P.s is perhaps even worse, for there are still between 150,000 and 200,000 of the old, weak, infirm and unemployables in D.P. camps in Germany.The unprecedented migration that followed the Potsdam agreement—when in the winter of 1945-6 fifteen million people were moved out of Eastern Germany and neighbouring territories to make way for Poles and Russians—has provided an unprecedented responsibility for the Church in Germany. Only twelve million finally arrived in Western Germany—three million died or were directed eastward— but nearly half of them were Catholic, coming from the almost completely Catholic areas of Upper Silesia and the Sudeten territory, as well as from Tower Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania. Up to the last war the Catholic and Protestant majorities in Germany could be delimited almost exactly by the boundaries set up by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1,648 on the principle ‘cujus regio ejus religio.
Blasphemous Poets
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

Early in May this year the proctors of Cambridge University took action against The Granta in view of complaints that a poem published in that magazine was blasphemous. The affair made a stir in Cambridge and even got into the London papers j and if I take it here chiefly as an occasion for some remarks on the blasphemies of certain long-dead poets, this is not because I consider the Granta poem negligible. It was not. The remarks that follow are merely one observer’s modest attempt to get the whole subject into focus.One may start with St Thomas’s preliminary definition of blasphemy: ‘the term seems to denote the disparagement of some high degree of goodness, and especially of the divine goodness’. In the context certain things are presupposed 5 in particular that there is such a thing as goodness, that it has degrees, and that there is a maximum goodness called God. ‘Blasphemy’ is related chiefly to God, as it always has been since the New Testament writers stressed the religious reference of blasphemia (in general, scurrilous or abusive language), though this reference was not lacking in classical Greek, just as the wider or secular sense of the term still appears in the New Testament itself. Both Francis Bacon and St Thomas’s master St Albert speak of ‘blasphemy’ against learning or knowledge; others have spoken of blasphemy against nature, friendship, and so on. But these are extensions of a term already appropriated by Christianity to mean disparaging speech about God, or about things and persons closely associated with him.
Burgundian Pilgrimage
Authors: Squire Aelred 
Published: July 2007

Beggars can’t be choosers, and when it was evident that the French strikes would make transport indefinitely doubtful, we decided to renounce the tidy shape of our original plans and let chance offers on the road take us where they might. Perhaps even in the limited time at our disposal—three days only—we should see something of St Bernard’s country and the places where he had been. So we set out, the two of us, hopefully.The first offer, taking us beyond Auxerre, came after no more than five minutes walking and we were soon moving through the forest of Fontainebleau in the morning sunshine. The rain which had broken the oppressive heat of the previous two days had left the leaves clean and shining, and beyond the wood the blue sky opened that was above us all the way; a route through Moret with its narrow gates and an old house in a world of moving waters, past Sens, and gradually into downland till you are on a ridge of hills. The trees along the road change from poplar to unclipped chestnut and then to generous plane and, now in the Côte d’Or, the Yonne lies below on the right, a broad and pleasant river in a singularly favoured land. To have read in one’s history books of the power of the medieval Dukes of Burgundy is to have learned the hard way. Here one has only to look to understand. A country of such resources, so royally self-sufficient and assured, could scarcely be less than a kingdom. The light has a quality all its own, the very air moving among the leaves in the orchards seems blended according to secret ingredients. And white and honey-coloured in this light, bathed in this air, on the crown of a steep hill stands the abbey of Vézelay.
Latin American
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

As you approach Buenos Aires, sailing slowly through the dredged channel of the vast brown River Plate, you are aware of a skyline that is exceedingly strange. It is not just the fact of the towering skyscrapers. This is America, and north and south alike seem committed to this monolithic invasion of the sky. What is extraordinary is that you can see through so many of these blocks of stone: the blue that fills the window-spaces is innocent air. It is bomb-damage in reverse, or even, you may think, in anticipation. Later you will be reassured. Here, it appears, building goes on as long as the money lasts, and work can be suspended for years at a time. (In a suburb one saw a completed ferro-concrete steeple, improbably balanced on the bare skeleton of a church yet to be built.)Building is a South American disease, or, more accurately, it is the symptom of a disease. In Argentina, as in Brazil, the fantastic growth of the cities has gravely disturbed the national equilibrium. Buenos Aires, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, has a population of four million, and including the province of the same name, accounts for half the total for the whole republic. Even though Argentina were far more developed industrially than she is (and the facts of nature have determined the primary role of the country as one of the greatest food-producing areas of the world), so disproportionate a head for such a body induces a sort of vertigo whose effects are immediately seen.
Television and Opinion
Authors: Gorham Maurice 
Published: July 2007

Television is the best medium yet discovered for selling goods. That is the opinion of practical men in the United States, the home of commercial television, and it can be backed up by an array of facts and figures showing how the enormous sums of money spent on television advertising justify themselves in the eyes of those whose business it is to sell mass-produced goods.The same factors that enable television to sell goods enables it also to sell ideas, provided that, like the goods, they are suitable for a mass public. Television is probably not the best medium for spreading original ideas, any more than it is the best medium for selling first editions or vintage port or thoroughbred sires or any other commodity that can be bought only by the few. But for the sort of vague general ideas that make up most people’s everyday thinking, for the habits of thought and standards of value that influence the ordinary man’s life, television has advantages over and above the other forms of mass-communication—print, cinema, radio—and it has access to people who are rarely touched by the still older influence of platform, stage, and pulpit.Not so long ago, most people in civilized countries viewed the world through the medium of the popular newspaper and the cheap book. Later, this medium was largely displaced by the radio and the films. Now television is showing its power to replace them all as the universal oracle, the social law-giver, the norm-setter, the mirror in which you can see life as it ought to be and as you come to think it is.
Religion and Television
Authors: Andrew Agnellus 
Published: July 2007

During the past year, the B.B.C. has broadcast about fifty religious television programmes. Of these, twelve were major ‘outside broadcasts’ from churches, and the rest were from the studio. Catholics contributed six programmes: Pontifical High Mass from Leeds Cathedral; the Easter Vigil from Clifton Cathedral; Evening Service with Benediction from St James’, Spanish Place; the Westminster Passion Play Behold the Man and Talks from the studio by Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mr Frank Sheed. Before last year we had contributed Solemn Mass from St Denis, Paris, and some half-a-dozen other programmes, including an Evening Service from St Chad’s, Birmingham, Stations of the Cross, the Christmas Crib and an illustrated Talk. All these broadcasts have been largely experimental. Comments and the reaction of viewers have been most carefully observed, and we are by no means yet clear in our minds as to the best way in which Television can serve the Catholic Apostolate.B.B.C. policy in religious television is identical with that in sound broadcasting which has been publicly stated more than once. Perhaps the clearest statement was made by the then Director General, Sir William Haley, in a speech to the British Council of Churches in November 1948. Dealing with the question whether the B.B.C. was neutral where Christian values were concerned, he said: ‘Of course it is not. There are many demands of impartiality laid upon the Corporation, but this is not one of them. We are citizens of a Christian country, and the B.B.C.— an institution set up by the State—bases its policy upon a positive attitude towards the Christian values.
Films and Television
Authors: Burke J. A. V. 
Published: July 2007

The publicists for television like to regard the medium as a threat to films, and though the film-makers—or, rather, the distributors—pretend that it is, the connection between the two forms of visual presentation is so close that it is impossible to separate them as completely as either of their advocates would, apparently, like.For a long time to come television programmes are going to have to depend on some kind of film presentation. There are a large number of newly-formed companies whose sole purpose is to make films for television consumption. Those so far viewed by the critics do not inspire confidence that any significant advance in the art of cinema need be expected. They are patently made as time-fillers and reflect the current lack of policy and sense of ill-at-ease to be seen among the producers of television programmes in this country.It should have dawned by now upon the minds of both sellers and buyers of television programmes, that whatever the actual merits or demerits of films or telecasts at the present moment, ultimately they will have to differ considerably from each other and also, ultimately, they will have to be good of their kind if the customers are to be expected to continue their patronage of either kind of diversion.It is interesting to note that, despite the frantic efforts of the film-world to try out various forms of wide-screen and panoramic and three-dimensional films during the past year in order to provide a counter-attraction to television, the films so far shown nave not been highly rated by the critics.
Television and the Catholic World
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

Unda is not the latest of the initial-words that reflect the multitude of international organizations that have come into being to serve the hopes and fears of the post-war world. It is simply the Latin word for ‘wave’ and is the convenient name for the co-ordinating body for Catholic radio and television throughout the world, with its headquarters at Fribourg in Switzerland. Last February, the television section of unda organized the first international Conference for Catholic television in Paris. It was attended by representatives from most western European countries, as well as Canada, the United States and Cuba, together with observers from UNESCO and the Council of Europe.In a first gathering, with terms of reference so necessarily wide, the work of the Conference was largely exploratory, but it was soon evident that in many countries the potentialities of so powerful a medium of mass communication as television were already acutely realized by the Church. Indeed the Conference was prefaced by the ordinary Sunday morning religious programme from the French television studios, and the delegates were able to see for themselves how the French Dominicans (to whose charge the programme has been committed) have met the demand for Catholic worship and instruction through the new medium. It was a touching detail that the infant son of the producer of religious television features should have been baptized in the studio before the Mass began—perhaps a symbol of how actual is the inspiration of French religious television, now in its sixth year of active production.
Trade Unions and Responsibility
Authors: O'Brien Tom 
Published: July 2007

Pope Leo XIII, in his letter Rerum Novarum of 1891, said the condition of the working classes was the pressing question of the hour; that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade were concentrated in the hands of comparatively few individuals, so that ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.’In that same year there met in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the twenty-fourth Annual meeting of the Trade Union Congress, over which presided a miner—a Mr T. Burt. That Congress represented a little more than 1,300,000 organized workers. Last year it was my great honour, at the Isle of Man, to preside over the eighty-fifth gathering of the T.U.C. representing over 8,000,000 trade unionists.The British trade union movement knew only too well the truth of the Pope’s words. Had it not waged for many years before an incessant struggle against the evil social conditions produced by the growth of nineteenth-century industrialism?When the first T.U.C. met in Manchester in 1868, 34 delegates attended, representing 118,000 members. Barely thirty-four years after George Lovelace, a farm labourer of the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, and five of his colleagues, had been convicted before the High Court for ‘treason’—i.e. administering ‘an unlawful oath’ and endeavouring to form a branch of the farm workers’ union— and transported to Botany Bay in the infamous convict ships of the day. The beginnings of our trade unions are rooted in struggle, hatreds, victimization and oppression. They were outlawed as conspirators, deprived of the right to hold property, handicapped by Governments, and ruthlessly opposed by employers.
The Imperfections of Criticism
Authors: Sharrock Roger 
Published: July 2007

One of the paradoxes of the modern literary situation is that we have more criticism than ever before, while this critical activity has not been accompanied by any corresponding clarification of artistic values or by the emergence of a distinct literary tradition. In poetry, for instance, there is a bewildering variety of individual voices as well as a diversity of what may be called group- or coterie-styles; of course poetry is written by poets and not by traditions, but our present variety does not result merely from the healthy abundance of individual talents; it comprises utterly different solutions to the same fundamental problems, as in the contrast between the deliberately pedantic nicety in the use of words of Mr Empson and his followers, where the single irony or ambiguity is everything, and the blurred use of epithets for their vague suggestiveness in the verse of Miss Edith Sitwell and Mr W. R. Rodgers. In earlier periods, as in our neo-classical age, such intense critical activity was often the prelude to the emergence of a poetic school with a common programme.To turn to the critics themselves, their numbers, the authority they command, and the extreme sophistication of literary argument to which they have accustomed us, would suggest that we are entering upon an Alexandrian age. To remark this now strikes a respectably commonplace, almost a trite, note; but until comparatively recently it would have been quite impossible to think in this manner. Thirty-four years ago in The Sacred Wood Mr T. S. Eliot deplored the lack of trained second-order minds on the English literary scene (he was at pains to indicate that his use of the term ‘second-order’ was in no sense derogatory).
Elizabeth Inchbald
Authors: Hamnett Ian 
Published: July 2007

Elizabeth Simpson was born at Standingfield in 1753. Her parents were Catholic gentry-yeomen of Suffolk, whose simple way of life did not satisfy Elizabeth’s ambitious spirit. Growing up to be intelligent and attractive, she also suffered from an impediment of speech, the desire to conquer which probably inspired her to seek a living in that profession least suited to a stammerer—the stage. Eventually, she ran away from home and arrived in London—‘that perilous town’, as she later described it, ‘which has received for centuries past . . . the bold adventurer of every denomination’. As a distinct adventuress she was attracted by the glamour of the metropolis, but she soon learned that there was a seamier side. It is surprising that so attractive, so innocent and so penniless a girl, always ready for a flirtation, should have survived these perilous weeks unscathed. However, she found security quite soon by marrying a provincial actor called Inchbald, also a Catholic, who died a few years later in 1779. She had already joined a travelling repertory company, and shared its never very prosperous fortunes, but unlike the rest of her female companions, she learned, observed and hoped. She had begun a novel; but in 1784 she had the great joy of seeing her first play accepted and produced with great success before a London audience. The hard years were over and Mrs Inchbald’s career had begun.For the next two decades, hardly a year passed in which a new play by Mrs Inchbald was not performed.
Pius the Tenth
Authors: Flynn Thomas Edward 
Published: July 2007

A Catholic always finds a papal audience a thrilling experience and we know how men and women of every race, colour, creed and social station have been moved by the charm, graciousness and penetrating holiness of the present Holy Father. But it was a unique event in the life of a young priest, whose professional studies had synchronized with the first half of the reign of Pope Pius X, to see and hear and kiss the hand of that holy Pontiff as I did in 1912. Even then he was commonly regarded as a saint, as we now know that he was; and to have been in such close contact with a beatified or canonized saint is in itself something to remember for a lifetime.I can see him now as he entered the large hall where he greeted many hundreds of people. He gave an impression of great age, but still more of extreme weariness. The years of responsibility and of constant strife had taken their toll. No longer was there the splendid physique and optimistic outlook which we recognize in the portrait of the Bishop of Mantua of thirty years earlier. I remember most vividly the tone of his voice and the rather sad and appraising eyes with which he gazed on each of us in turn; his very slow progress round the room; and, as a final impression, his quite different appearance as one glanced into a smaller audience chamber where a very small boy was almost romping about him and tugging at his cassock.
The Appeal to Sound Learning—II
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

Against the general background, which we attempted to outline in a previous article, it is now possible to fill in with greater detail the main elements of the Catholic approach to truth in contrast with the Anglican appeal to sound learning; and this with no controversial intention, but with the eirenic aim, not indeed of resolving the contrast, but at least of showing it less in caricature, and in truer proportions and balance. The true following of Christ, in whatever Christian allegiance it is found, is the result of a union, intimate and ineffable, between two persons; a human person and the Person of Jesus Christ, God made man.This union begins in the supernatural life of grace received in Baptism. It cannot spring from any power innate in human nature; it is wholly given. There comes a time to all who receive this gift when its purpose, the love of God in Christ, is consciously apprehended. The inmost self-hood is confronted by Christ, who is either rejected, or accepted in the obedience and love of divinely given faith. Where explicit knowledge of his person is absent the encounter would seem to be implicit in what conscience presents as good. The union so completed varies in intensity in each person. In some for a whole lifetime obedience is fitful and love lukewarm; the gift does not grow beyond an inchoate stage. In others it fructifies in a union of deep and perfect friendship. Once embraced it is never wholly lost except by an act of deliberate rebellion which theologians call mortal sin.
Journalistic Responsibility
Authors: Sewell Gordon 
Published: July 2007

Recent protests against the publication of ‘obnoxious matter’ in the pages of certain newspapers have done little more than echo what the General Council of the Press had already said on this subject. At one of its earliest meetings— last October—the Council declared itself to be ‘deeply concerned by the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers and periodicals’, and placed on record its view that ‘such treatment is calculated to injure public morals’ and is contrary, to the standards of journalism which the Council is duty-bound to maintain.Strong words! But verbal condemnation by itself is insufficient. The Press Council is a voluntary body representing newspaper proprietors, editors and working journalists. It has no statutory powers. Its apparent inability to do anything effective to improve matters raises anew, for the individual pressman, the whole question of journalistic responsibility.Strangely enough, the Royal Commission on the Press (1947-49) had little to say on this subject of the unwholesome exploitation of sex, being concerned rather with cases of alleged political bias and of inaccurate reporting. What it did say, however, was often sound, and should be recalled. Sensationalism, for instance, it described as ‘partly an extreme manifestation of the peculiar values reflected in the popular newspapers, partly a desire to provide the excitement which the reader is believed, and has beat taught, to expect’. And this, as one witness expressed it, is done by publishing prominent and detailed reports of crime, of lie relations between the sexes, and of extraordinary or scandalous behaviour, which ‘minister... to the imaginative gratification of the reader’.