bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Missiology
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

According to Father Rommerskirchen (Guide des Missions Catholiques 1937, p. 165) we owe the word ‘missiology’ to the French—the term ‘missiologie’ having been popularised by P&re Charles, S.J. German Catholics, under the inspiration of Professor Schmidlin, have preferred to use the word ‘Missionswissenschaft’ and it is perhaps unfortunate that English speaking Catholics did not follow their example and talk of the study or science of missions, rather than the clumsy and pretentious ‘missiology’.Granted, however, that the term is in common use, the purpose of this essay is to attempt to explain its meaning. The explanation is really quite simple. Missiology is the scientific investigation and description of the history and conditions of the apostolic action of the Church in pagan countries. It is that part of Dogmatic Theology which provides us with a justification for what are termed Foreign Missions, and which discusses the ‘mode’ of missionary activity in relation to the data provided by the anthropologist, the historian of culture and other allied specialists. In so far as it is a self-conscious discipline Missiology is recent, but in principle, in its dogmatic foundations, it is part of the theological heritage of the Church. .The Fathers and the great Scholastics dealt with its fundamental presuppositions as parts of the treatises on Providence and Faith. The discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, in that they revealed vast groups of persons ignorant of the Gospel, led to an extension of these treatises in relation to the problem of the salvation of the infidel. Lastly, in our own day the growth of the sciences of Anthropology and relevant discoveries in the fields of Comparative Religion and Psychology, have led to the accumulation of a vast mass of data which demands theological interpretation and application in practice. It is against this background that the pioneers, too numerous to mention, of Missiology have developed their discipline.
Mobility and Property
Authors: Synnot Finbar 
Published: July 2007

The idea of this article was suggested by an anthropological lecture on two aboriginal peoples of the Pacific.Two peoples, the Andamanese Islanders and the Tikopia, have lived within boating distance of each other for countless generations. The one is semi-nomadic, hunting and fishing. The other is, or was, agricultural. In the first the communal element in the ownership of property is very marked. In the second the private or personal ownership was far more marked.From this arises a thought. Is it possible that the question of the balance of individual with communal or social rights in the ownership and use of property is not a matter of industrialism, nor of atheism, but chiefly of mobility or immobility of social occupation?One can follow the idea in many fields: for instance in the Catholic Middle Ages. As the peoples of Europe began to settle, but were yet uncertain and largely mobile and pastoral, they developed the system called feudalism. Feudalism was a kind of socialism, in the sense that the prince, the owner and the employer all three coincided in the person of the feudal lord. All lands were held in trust from him. He was the government. He was the employer in so far as there was an employer outside the subsistence economy of the people who held tenures on his land.As the people became more and more settled, agricultural, less and and less mobile, in the later Middle Ages and Reformation period, absolute individual tenure of land outside any further responsibility to an overlord became more and more common. The squirearchies appeared, and more and more independent farmers.
Gradation, Evolution and Reincarnation
Authors: Coomaraswamy Ananda K. 
Published: July 2007

The following essay by Dr Coomaraswamy is offered to Black- friars readers for the very high degree of interest which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar standpoint to the familiar problem of the relation of science to religion.The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the imagination of East and West lends support to the concept of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself which is called modem philosophy, has tended to imagine reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act, personal or impersonal as the point of view changes.For St Thomas also, being is an ‘act’ to which, ultimately, even substance among the categories is potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other position available to the West can fruitful contact be made with the tradition Dr Coomaraswamy represents.From a deepened understanding of the principles of St Thomas’s metaphysics, it may be possible, now that Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern tradition further than the position outlined in the De Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of consciousness of which Dr Coomaraswamy speaks, has nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental conceptions of theological modernism.
Material Foresight & Wastefulness
Authors: Riviere Isabelle 
Published: July 2007

“How can prudent foresight be wastefulness? It doesn’t do to talk absurdities!”It all becomes clear and easy if we once understand that God knows what he is saying ! With what simplification should we not be enriched if we would be persuaded that not one of his words is useless, not one of his commandments thrown at hazard and without a profound reason, that their end, since he loves us, is none other than our greatest good, our surest happiness. And then, that he is always right.It is not sufficient, in order to put h'm in the wrong, that we should understand the necessity of what he ordains. It may be we lack some of the elements that would enable us to judge. God sees continually, and in the light of eternity, the totality of creation. As for ourselves, have we taken into consideration that our hand held before our eyes suffices to hide from them the narrow section that they embrace of our limited, terrestrial and changing horizon? How then should it not be that the greater part of God’s motives escape us? . . . Before judging God, let us first follow his teaching a little while to discover where it leads.Let us see what trouble God takes to prove to us, by daily, unfailing experience, that foresight such as we understand it, is a bad speculation, whatever we may think of it.The Hebrews would not listen to him, and believed themselves well advised to make a provision of manna for the following day, but it began to be full of worms, and it putrified.
The Place of the Crofter
Authors: Moncrieff George Scott 
Published: July 2007

The romantic gloss that adheres to the crofter, his homestead and way of life, has given ample target for the shafts of the critics. They point out, with some justice, the poverty and hardship frequently entailed and the ambition of many crofters to send their sons to the cities. With less justice, probably none, they claim greater efficiency for larger units of cultivation. These critics are essentially children of the Industrial Age, as ever overlooking the more acute destitution that no reform has as yet eradicated from the way of life begotten of their own concepts. They have ever a notion that urban hardship can be eliminated with just a few more rules, regulations and by-laws. Unconsciously, they pay the crofter tribute in recognising that his life is not so easily directed.We can hardly assess the value of the crofter to a civilised community without considering certain fundamentals. The root of the problem lies at the very quick of the question: is man an individual servant of God, or a servant of society? I do not think this is an over-simplification of the issue. Throughout the world today that same issue is being disputed. Everywhere, peasant societies are the backbone of resistance to authoritarianism and the subjection of man to society as vested in the State.
Father Hugh Pope
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J. 
Published: July 2007

We are gathered to do reverence to the memory of a great priest, a great apostle, a great Dominican. We are gathered to offer the Holy Sacrifice to God to the end that he may speedily receive into his eternal peace the soul of one who was for all who knew him an inspiration and an example, a veritable man of God, one who was for so many of us a loving father, a patient teacher, a wise counsellor and an understanding friend. It is written in Holy Scripture: Praise not a man before his death, for a man is known by his children. Those of us who knew Father Hugh Pope best have not been able to refrain from praising him even while he yet lived; but now there can be no withholding that praise on the part of any; for he is indeed known by his children, known by the offspring of his apostolic mind, known by the many souls he brought to God, known by the brethren of his Order whom he nurtured by his paternal care and affection.In his recent allocution to the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers the Holy Father fastened upon the very pillars of true Dominican life when he reminded all Dominicans that, in the words of their Constitutions, they must be ‘resolute in peace, assiduous in study and fervent in preaching’ if they would prove themselves worthy of their honoured name and high calling. When we look back over the long course of Father Hugh's life in the Dominican Order we realise that he set himself from the outset to attain an ideal which he pursued unwaveringly to the very end.
Towards A Catholic Criticism
Authors: Cleeves Janet 
Published: July 2007

Criticism begins in an act of reason. Beason separates individual qualities from a previously undifferentiated whole. Judgment then steps in to appraise the result. Criticism in art results from the detachment of the spectator from the artist and from his work. It works in two ways. It gives awareness of the qualities in the object surveyed. It also reveals to the critic his own attitude towards it. Criticism is, therefore, an advance from the unquestioning acceptance or rejection of an undeveloped mind.The ancient Greeks lived in an age of great sculpture. We do not find in their writings praise or blame of such works. Criticism originally arose with them in connection with the decline of Hellenic drama, in the Middle Ages books of aesthetics, pointing out the aims, the failures or successes of the architectural magnificence springing up in town and country, were unthinkable. When man has lost the power to create things of beauty he becomes aware of the nature of these. He becomes a critic.To become aware of the nature of any idea or state of being is to have passed, for better or for worse, beyond it. With the loss of innocence came knowledge of both man’s physical nakedness and his need for a covering. Constant preoccupation with an idea is usually symptomatic of immediate unattainability.
Towards State-Controlled Medicine
Authors: Badenoch A. G. 
Published: July 2007

Poor people do not differ from rich people in this natural characteristic, that they both like to have individual medical attention and realise that the best way to obtain this is to pay a reasonable fee to the doctor of their choice. Nevertheless one meets many people of all classes who make, sometimes grudgingly, the admission that they think a State Medical Service would be a good thing.There are several causes of this discrepancy. In the first place, it is by no means confined to medical matters. More than ever since the Second War, some commodities are badly distributed and many of us have got into the way of thinking that nationalisation, or control by the State, offers a satisfactory solution. This is a trend of the times, and statistical statements have got us into the habit of supposing a ‘trend’ to be something inevitable. Eor instance, this was the defeatist talk some years ago of many doctors who were by temperament, by training and by reasoned conviction opposed to State Medicine as a bad thing for the people: they summed up wearily by saying that it was all a trend of the times and there was no resisting it. Another attitude, less easy to dispose of, was, and is, to point to the many defects in our present medical services and to suggest that State control at least offers a remedy, no other being available.
A Study in Integrity
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: July 2007

What do we mean by ‘integration”? A creature is integral when it possesses all it needs for its perfection and completeness. A thing can remain essentially intact without being whole or integral. A car on its trials with engine, wheels and chassis only is essentially a car but it has no integrity. Or again we use integrity of a character that has preserved the wholeness of a good moral life or of fidelity to truth, as opposed to the one who has compromised either of these perfections by his conduct or dishonesty—for even should he repent he will lack something; he will lack that unity of a life unbroken by sin. By integration, then, we mean that quality of wholeness which is given to a thing when it is finally completed; and when applied to human life this quality can only be gauged with respect to the whole of life from childhood to old age, a life begun with a certain perfection given by God the Creator, but with a hundred conflicting possibilities and powers which have to be co-ordinated into a whole, i.e., integrated.It is just this element of intactness which is absent in modern life. We manage on the whole to preserve the essentials of life for we continue, at least barely, to Jive. But there is no sense of completeness about it. Our home life is one thing, our work another, our leisure another, and our religion something apart from all these: all are divided off into separate compartments.
Liturgy and Spiritual Exegesis (II)
Authors: Bouyer L. 
Published: July 2007

By now we should be able to understand without being disturbed or disconcerted how deeply this process of ‘Allegorization’ is bound up with the flowering of the New Testament. We have now gone beyond the form to the essence of the Gospel message. After the explanations we have given, we need no longer fear to say it; the very concepts, the fundamental ideas in the preaching of Jesus and the Apostles are now revealed, not simply in their imaginative clothing but in their most intimate substructure, as allegorisations of ideas in the Old Testament. To prove this we will consider just three ideas, but they are the most central in the New Testament: that of the Kingdom, of the Messias, and of Sacrifice. On these three themes alone all Christian dogma could be reconstructed.Where do they come from? How do they arise? It is unnecessary to point out the place assigned to the Kingdom in the preaching of our Lord as given in the Synoptics; that preaching is the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ and nothing else. But where does the idea itself come from? One can assign it a double origin; on the one hand the old eschatological concept (going back to the origins of the religion of Israel) of the ‘Day’ when ‘all will be changed’, when God will intervene in the affairs of this world as an all-powerful judge and will re-establish all things in conformity with his will. And on the other hand the ‘mother-idea’ from which the expression ‘people of God’ arises.
The Intellectual Apostolate in South Africa
Authors: Versfeld Marthinus 
Published: July 2007

What I wish to do here is to touch upon some points in the intellectual and cultural situation in South Africa. This means that I must confine myself to a picture of what Europeans are doing, since the disadvantages under which non-Europeans are labouring have not made possible for them much acquisition of the natural goods. The Church in South Africa is above all an African church. Europeans, and especially European Catholics, are in a minority. Hence I shall be dealing with a minority which has largely monopolised the privileges of education and which must therefore be held peculiarly accountable for the use of the treasure which it has appropriated. My further reason for thus confining my field is the large part being played in the conversion of South Africa by the Dominicans who are so well versed in grafting the Faith upon the higher activities of the natural man.In estimating the influences which have formed the mind of South African Europeans one must be careful to give full weight to the positive contribution of Calvinism, especially the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church. The original colonists were Dutch and French Protestants, and the great majority of their descendants still hold to that confession, seriously and conservatively, as a rural population will. It is a tradition which has fostered Bible-reading, a strong and genuine family life, and the virtues enjoined by the Decalogue. It has been favourable to the formation of a legalistic and patriarchal temper of mind, and has kept alive a strong antipapist animus. It is not within my province to estimate the religious situation, but rather to call attention to certain repercussions in the cultural sphere.
The Language of the Greek Fathers
Authors: Graef H. C. 
Published: July 2007

As the catalogues of the publishers show there is a great revival of interest in the study of the Fathers, especially the Greek Fathers, so long overshadowed by their better known and more accessible Latin brethren. If we read that the Editions du Cerf have already brought out translations of authors as comparatively little known as the apologist Athenagoras, the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, John Moschus and Maximus Confessor, a new spring of patristic studies seems indeed to be upon us, and from America there come the translations of St Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians and of the Seven Letters of St Ignatius. Will England, whose interest in the Greek Fathers has always been particularly keen (we need only remember the work of Newman and Pusey, of Lightfoot and Prestige) take no part in this renaissance?It is hoped that, in a few years’ time, there will be brought out in this country a great and fundamental work, which has been in preparation for about forty years. We are referring to the Lexicon of Patristic Greek, begun in Cambridge in 1906 under the editorship of Dr H. B. Swete, and transferred to Oxford in 1915, for which material has been steadily collected throughout these years. Under the editorship of Dr F. L. Cross, the present Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, assisted by a small and harmonious team of Catholic and Anglican collaborators, this work has now entered on its final stage, in which the immense material, assembled in a large room in the New Bodleian Building, is being sifted and put into shape.
Notre Dame — Saint Alban
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

On the outskirts of Lyons a vast monolith of a hospital commemorates the secular patron of that city of martyrs—Edouard Herriot. You take the bouncing tram from Place Bellecour (the Germans stole the trolleybuses), and at Blanche Grange you enquire for the church of Notre Dame—Saint Alban. It is hidden away behind the clinical cliffs of the hospital, and there is little enough about this plain box of a church to make it remarkable. But it is precisely here, amidst a sprawling suburb of flats and hostels, of workmen's dwellings and doctors’ villas, that for the last twenty-five years the abbé Laurent Remillieux has built up a Christian community which by this is known throughout France and beyond.How did it happen? Père Chéry, who in his Paroisse Communauté Missionaire so vividly recorded the achievement of the Abbé Michonneau in the industrial parish of Colombes, has now published an account of the Lyonese parish which goes far to answer that question. Even the casual visitor to Saint Alban is aware that this is no ordinary church; or rather that here is a most ordinary church in which is realised the true function of a house of God, the meeting-place of God’s people, a living community of the faithful made one per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso.
Easter Customs in Poland
Authors: Kreutza A. 
Published: July 2007

Saint Paul insists, as we know, on the idea that the whole of Christianity depends on the fact of Christ's Resurrection. ‘If Christ has not risen’, he says, ‘our faith is vain and our hope groundless’, adding at once, ‘No, Christ really has risen from the dead, and I am witness to that’.In Poland this thought of Christ’s Resurrection in addition to being a fundamental article of religious faith, had also a deeply patriotic and national meaning. During the period of enemy domination the feast of the Resurrection, the Christian Easter, became as well a symbol of national resurrection. Each of the faithful who spoke of the risen Christ, the conqueror over death, joined thereto in his heart another thought and sentiment—his lively and fundamental hope in the resurrection of Poland. That is what gave Easter, on both the traditional and the religious side, a very special colour which made its old popular customs still dearer, more intimate and more venerable. We do not know how the Easter festival can be observed in Poland at the present day, but we may be sure that no Pole behind the Iron Curtain ever lets go his steadfast hope of seeing his country really free and returning to life.The season of Lent has had in Poland for centuries a special popular service, the singing of the Lamentation*, or Bitter Mourning for the Passion. This must not be confused with Tenebrae in Holy Week. It is sung in church several times a week, usually on Wednesdays and Fridays and also on Sunday evenings.
Claudel's Poetic Art (II)
Authors: Ryan Mary 
Published: July 2007

Fully to understand Claudel’s theory of poetic-expression we must follow his analysis of movement. Being, self-existent, is motionless; created things, both matter and spirit, are in movement. This motion imprinted on them by the Creator-Spirit gives them their sense : we have seen how much Claudel means by that word. He uses the metaphor of flight (/wife) to express their movement out from the Creator; but their origin is also their end (fin, goal and limit) and they are moving back thither. ‘Now every movement results in the creation or maintenance of a state of equilibrium’ (p. 75), but only through a constant tension because everything other than complete and self-sufficing Being is in a condition of ‘interplay and contradiction’ (p. 147). Man, like other creatures, is perpetually in movement for ‘there is movement wherever there is variation in existence’.14 It may be a movement of inner vibration tending to produce the form; or a movement of efference or outward process.That the whole of creation, even inanimate, is in a state of alternating movement is also a hypothesis of modern science. But while its materialist exponents ‘observe the working of a machine’, the Christian thinker ‘enjoys the use of an instrument’ (Art Poetique, p. 28). For these changes, contacts, responses, man has, in common with the animals, senses: sensation is the first phenomenon of our activity, but we are not, like the animals, passive under it. Our senses are our tools: ‘as we learn the use of a tool by apprenticeship so we educate our senses’ (id. p. 91).