bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Holy Writ and Holy Church
Authors: Congar Yves M‐J. 
Published: July 2007

For several years now one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has been the problem of Tradition. The kernel of this problem consists in the relations between Scripture and Tradition and between Scripture and the Church. Several important studies have been published on this theme, and it is undeniable that continental Protestantism has become sympathetic to some notion of tradition. At the same time it must be admitted that Protestant theologians today are no more able than was even so conciliating a figure as Melanchthon at the period of the Reformation to get over the notion of a separation between Scripture and Church, a separation which inevitably leads to the subordination of a purely human Church to a tradition regarded as divine, external and superior to this Church.However, there have been some excellent studies in this field from the Catholic side which have helped to clear the ground of certain false problems and inadequate notions. Professor J. R. Geiselmann and E. Ortigues have put us all in their debt by their efforts to lay bare the precise meaning of the Tridentine decrees. The Acta of the Council of Trent remain indeed a useful and fascinating quarry for the theologian of today. It is, for example, of the greatest importance for the advance both of Catholic theology itself and of the ecumenical dialogue to learn that the Fathers of the Council deliberately omitted a proposed text according to which Revelation was to be found partly in Scripture and partly in unwritten apostolic traditions.
The Language of a Mission
Authors: Griffiths Bede 
Published: July 2007

The liturgical congress, held at Uden near Nijmegen in Holland last September, was in a sense a successor to those which were held in recent years at Lugano and Assisi, and one may hope that it will be of no less importance in the history of the Church. By turning attention to the problems of the Liturgy in the missions its scope was in one sense more restricted, but in another sense it was much enlarged. There is, on the one hand, more scope and freedom for the development of the liturgy in the missions where the field is less trammelled by the past than in Europe, and on the other hand, the problems of the liturgy in the missions have an even greater urgency. This was brought out by Bishop Blomjous of Tanganyika in his opening address, when he showed how the Church has reached a moment of crisis in the missions. When we speak of the ‘missions’, we are speaking of the new world of Asia and Africa which is coming into being at the present time and which is undergoing a radical transformation year by year. The problem of the liturgy in the missions is nothing less than the problem of the Church in the face of this new world.The Congress was admirably representative of this new world. It was presided over by Cardinal Gracias and included about thirty bishops and thirty priests from different parts of Asia and Africa, besides experts on the liturgy from all parts of Europe and America.
Gnosticism and Christianity
Authors: Bourke Joseph 
Published: July 2007

It was in 1945 or 1946 that a group of Egyptian peasants, digging on the site of an early Christian cemetery near the village of Nag-Hammadi, unearthed an urn containing thirteen manuscripts. The contents of this urn have subsequently proved to be of epoch-making importance for the study of the New Testament and of early Church history.In those early stages a few leaves of the papyrus were unfortunately burned. But the collection as we have it today comprises between eight hundred and one thousand papyrus leaves, most of them in remarkably good condition. On examination these have proved to constitute a library of forty-nine treatises written in Coptic about the fourth century a.d., and in several different dialects. It is clear that so fine a library must be attributed to the work of many different copyists, whose work extends over a period of more than a century. This in turn suggests that a religious community flourished at Nag-Hammadi some time in the course of the fourth century, and from the contents of the manuscripts it is obvious that its members must have been adherents of the dangerous and widespread heresy which extends, in manifold terms, from the second to the eighth centuries a.d., and which is nowadays known as Gnosticism.The manuscripts found their way to Cairo in three separate lots. One of them, now entitled the ‘Jung Codex’, was illegally smuggled out of Egypt by a Belgian antiquarian, bought in America, and given to Dr Jung as an eightieth birthday present.
The African in Transition
Authors: Duggan A. J. 
Published: July 2007

In these days, when it is fashionable to pay lip-service to what everyone calls democracy, one hears a good deal of verbal by-play with Rousseau’s phrase ‘All men are born equal’. No greater fallacy than that has ever been reiterated with more determined disregard of obvious truth. No matter how bitter it is, the fact remains that none of us has been born equal to anyone. Individually, we all enter and remain in this world either richer or poorer, cleverer or duller, stronger or weaker, quicker or slower, than everyone with whom we come into contact in our daily lives. This inequality of endowment stares us in the face even more conspicuously when we consider nationalities than it does on the plane of purely personal relationships. And nowhere in the international sphere does it stand out more clearly than when white men and black stand side by side amid the cataclysmic changes now taking place in Africa.Today we live in an era when, throughout that continent, hitherto unsophisticated peoples are forming themselves into national organizations, which, although rudimentary and experimental by Western standards, will ultimately exert a very considerable influence upon our own national interests by their participation and possibly their opposition, vote for vote, in the great council chambers of the world.It is therefore necessary for us to know something of the physical and mental heritage of African peoples in general, that our future relations with them, whether in commerce, in politics, in academics or in the mission field, may be conducted at least with understanding, if not with agreement.
Father William Houghton, O.P.: 1736–1823
Authors: Gumbley Walter 
Published: July 2007

All but five of Father Houghton’s sixty-three years of priesthood were spent in the care of a small and scattered missionary centre in the unobtrusive way of life forced on priests by the still-active penal code; a seclusion however that undoubtedly made possible the literary activity which was a marked characteristic of the Catholic clergy in the half-century preceding the Act of Emancipation. On literary grounds more than a score of Father Houghton’s clerical contemporaries have been included with him in the Dictionary of National Biography, whilst at least an equal number appear in Gillow’s extensive Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics. When we reflect that the total number of priests in England during Houghton’s life never exceeded four hundred, it can be seen that the percentage of those who wrote was very high. Moreover, there must have been many studious priests who from an excusable diffidence never published what they wrote. One remembers that even so industrious a scholar as the eminent historian Père Mandonnet admitted his dislike of putting pen to paper, leaving on his desk when he died a note with these words: ‘Lire, joie; penser, délices; écrire, supplice’.Father Houghton was born in 1736 in the hundred of West Derby, Lancashire, where his family, a branch of the Catholic family of Hoghton Tower, near Preston, had lived for some generations. In baptism he received the names of William and Narcissus, the second one for its classical flavour being much to his taste in later life and he kept it in constant use.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

The monumental tradition of stained glass has so closely tied its creator to the architect that as an art of its own, with a unique territory for the imagination to explore, it is as yet scarcely known. But things are changing, and the Arts Council’s travelling exhibition of modern stained glass (which will visit most of the principal cities of England and Wales during 1961) is an encouraging sign of the emergence of an independent art, freed from the near-monopoly of the commercial firms who up to now alone had the resources for its complex and expensive manufacture. And the recent exhibition at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London of the work of Patrick Reyntiens revealed an artist who combines a superb mastery of the technical problems of this most exacting of crafts with a rich and original imagination.The stained glass artist can rarely know the freedom the painter or the sculptor enjoys. His work is almost always commissioned, usually by clergy, and he is often expected to conform to structural patterns as well as to conventions of design. His failures are the most permanent of all, as a glance at almost any church built during the last hundred years or so will clearly prove. So vigorous a discipline is not necessarily a limitation, and the windows of Chartres or Fairford are there to declare it. Since the war, intelligent commissions (not, alas, from any Catholic source) have enabled artists such as John Piper to design windows on the heroic scale—as in the baptistery of Coventry Cathedral and in the chapel of Eton College.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

There is little doubt that the most ok cinematic name in England to-day is that of Michelangelo Antonioni; critics back from Cannes brought reports of I’Avventura as voluminous as they were contradictory, and when last autumn it finally came to London—briefly at the South Bank Festival and then for an extended commercial run—the wave of interest and praise gathered momentum. In January and February of this year the National Film Theatre, sensibly cashing in on a vogue which it had done much to initiate, has been running an Antonioni season, and at the time of writing we have been able to see all his work except La Notte, the latest, which may not be available in time for this series.It is, however, quite possible to come to some general conclusions about the work of this enigmatic director from the films shown already and, judging from I’Avventura, it seems unlikely in any case that the new picture is going to be radically different from the rest. Antonioni would never, I think, be a director with whom I would feel instinctively at home; his world is not mine, nor his obsessions; the people in whom he is interested are not those whose fives I should often feel drawn to study minutely. But his seeing eye, his concentration of observation, his obvious intellectual and sensuous delight in image and composition and movement compel one’s attentive admiration. In other words, though I often do not agree with what he has chosen to say, I would defend to the death his fashion of saying it.
Family Limitation
Authors: Dominian J. 
Published: July 2007

Within a very short time of entering the practice of medicine most Catholic doctors realize that by far the biggest single issue facing them in the arena of moral and professional responsibility is contraception. What may still be for us a controversial issue is a settled matter for our non-Catholic colleagues and almost a universal practice for our patients. As a community, Catholics have the tendency to protect themselves from disagreeable facts either by denying their existence or entertaining the most naive notions about them. This is an outlook which hitherto has spelled disaster in our handling of this problem.We can begin a useful reassessment by examining the size of this problem. One of the studies of the Royal Commission on Population in 1949 was devoted to the subject of family limitation. They took a representative sample of married women, covering all parts of the country and the years of marriage from 1900 to 1947. The following facts emerge. Before 1910, the percentage of women who used birth control was 15%; in the thirties it had risen to a figure of 66%. I would go further than this and suggest for practical purposes we have to accept to-day the fact that almost all childbearing couples at some time resort to some form of birth control. The only reasons for its exclusion in marital life appear to be religious opposition, sheer ignorance and, rarely, aesthetic considerations. It is a practice accepted as sensible and practical, and to entertain an alternative demands in itself an explanation and evidence of sanity from the person who proposes such a contrary view.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Cornford Christopher 
Published: July 2007

By way of respite from their indefatigable re-fighting of the battles of 1939-45 (I take it that by about 1971 we shall be getting down to ‘I Was Rommel’s Batman’s Uncle,’ No. 368 in the series Now It Can Be Told, And Just You Try And Stop Us Telling It) the editors of the Sunday Times occasionally suborn some eminent personage to act as guide to the British middle classes in a brief tour round quite another battlefield—admittedly a peripheral one and of no strategic importance—that of painting. Sometimes, I suspect, they don’t get quite what they bargained for. Thus Professor Lawrence Gowing, asked to provide some useful tips on sketching for the amateur, offered a ruminative, elliptical, and, to his professional colleagues, fascinating, account of his own profound researches and procedures in the landscape art. Thus Victor Pasmore, of whom it had perhaps been hoped that he would mitigate the austerities of pure abstraction with a little apologetic honey, came up with a difficult, uncompromising and disdainful manifesto with as little of the glad-hander about it as a curled-up hedgehog.But when Sir Kenneth Clark agreed to contribute a series of articles on important pictures of his own choosing, I think everyone must have been delighted with the result. He could not be faulted on matters of fact by the art-historians, being himself an illustrious elder of their tribe. The generality of painters might dissent in detail from his judgments, but they could not dismiss or deride them, based as they are on scrutiny of the works at least as long and acute as any which they themselves would be capable of, and on a far wider frame of historical and cultural reference.
Authority and Radicalism
Authors: Coulson John 
Published: July 2007

This is not a statement of a political kind: a manifesto for yet another Catholic Guild; nor is it what Field Marshal Montgomery would call an excuse for belly-aching. It is rather an agenda for further study—a plea for a new attitude of mind. I say attitude of mind, because my own experience of Catholics has been that in this country they still tend to look at social questions differently from their fellow Christians—as aliens, not as members by birth of a society which ‘belongs’ to the members of the other denominations, in their capacity as citizens. This attitude is expressed in terms of keeping oneself to oneself, or the halfresentful assumption of a superiority which is not felt: ‘They have the society, but we have authority’.But as far as social questions go, what does this authority amount to? A few half-remembered phrases from St Thomas, a couple of encyclicals? If so, this is not authority, but mere slogan-thinking.I have also met Catholics who say that social problems do not really exist as such. The only problems are theological. It is all a question of applying the answers already available in the deposit (that is, I think the term) of the faith. Thus an exact study of social questions is unnecessary, especially as the Welfare State has eliminated poverty, starvation, bad housing, and all the normal objects of Christian charity.
Myth, Symbol and Revelation
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

It may be helpful to approach the subject of the place of symbols in Christianity from the consideration of two sets of difficulties or disabilities which seem to affect many Catholics nowadays in the western world.First, Catholics are often accused of not reading the Old Testament. If this is true, and by and large it seems to be, it is important for us to discover why it is so; and the likely explanation seems to be that to a great extent we have lost the clue to the reading of the book, we have forgotten the ‘language’, the idiom, in which it is written. Again it seems undeniably true to say that the modern Catholic, however deep and vivid his belief in the efficacy of the sacraments, often finds little meaning if any in their ritual, the ritual for instance of the baptismal waters; whereas it is clear that in the days of primitive Christianity this same ritual had on the neophyte an immensely vivid impact.Secondly, many Catholics nowadays seem to feel that the formulas, the propositions, in which the Christian faith is stated and propounded to them in creed or catechism have about them a certain unreality: they seem so dry, so technical, so remote from ordinary everyday speech and everyday reality, that they may easily come in the end to seem meaningless: the dogmatic formulas, the definitions of faith, so remote and so dry as to be unreal; the moral principles, so neat and tidy as to seem lacking in validity.
Delinquent and Neurotic Children
Authors: Burns Charles 
Published: July 2007

The title of this article is also that of a recent book on the subject, which is a worthy attempt to evaluate certain hypotheses against an objective study of social and psychological factors. The author says: ‘Our fundamental aim was to make a comparison, critical for our theoretical understanding of later social maladjustment, of the divergent routes taken in emotional development by neurotic and delinquent children, from their early years’.There is no hard and fast distinction between the two groups, any more than there is in any category of human beings, but by trying to find the relative frequency and importance of the various factors in the two groups, it was hoped to throw into sharper relief and render more clear, those factors which are most important in the making of delinquents. The stress of the book is in the main on delinquency rather than on neurosis, as is evident from the excellent ‘Historical Background’ of the first chapter. It is rightly stressed, and this cannot be repeated too often, that: ‘The term “delinquent” is in no way a psychiatric or diagnostic entity in the proper sense, but gives a description of certain types of behaviour in many recognizable personality types’.The study was undertaken by the teams of the three child guidance clinics in West Sussex under the direction of Dr Bennett, who is a psychologist, originally from Australia. She gives credit to the late Dr Kate Friedlander who originated the project when she was psychiatric Director of the West Sussex child guidance service.
A Lawyer's View of the Natural Law
Authors: Hamnett Ian 
Published: July 2007

No doctrine of jurisprudence has so distinguished a history as the theory of the natural law. One of its earliest and noblest expressions is to be found in Sophocles, when Antigone refuses to obey Creon’s unjust commands and appeals to a law greater than human ordinance. In the form given to it by Greek Stoicism it was received and developed by the Roman philosophers and jurists; through St Isidore it passed into the middle ages where it found its most perfect expression in St Thomas Aquinas. It was adopted and applied by the Dutch Protestant jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it is still embraced by most Catholic thinkers today. It links the pagan and Christian traditions from classical antiquity to the twentieth century; and while its independence of supernatural revelation can be said to give it value as a praeparatio evangelica, its perfect consonance with dogma has led to its almost universal adoption in Catholic thought.This very acceptance by Catholics has, however, led to a great deal of confusion and to the advancement of some exaggerated and often meaningless claims. It may be useful to subject the natural law doctrine to an analysis based largely on theoretical and practical jurisprudence. Such an analysis will reveal the inadequacy of much that is commonly said about the doctrine as a possible theory of law and will illustrate, perhaps, why few lawyers show much enthusiasm for it.
The new social encyclical
Authors: Jackson J. M. 
Published: July 2007

Three times in the last seventy years, a major encyclical has been devoted primarily to economic and social questions. Each has made its contribution to the social doctrine of the Church, setting forth the moral principles which should govern economic and social relationships, drawing attention to the chief social evils of the day, and suggesting the general lines of reform. The latest of these encyclicals, Mater et Magistra, makes important contributions to the social teaching of the Church in four areas. First, there is a clear and authoritative re-statement of the principle of subsidiary function at a time when the provision of social services has been and is being greatly extended in many countries, and when the proper role of the state in this field is a subject of considerable controversy. Secondly, in its discussion of wages, profits and the status of the worker, the new encyclical clarifies the Church’s teaching, and also shows that despite the reforms that have already come about, in some measure in response to the earlier encyclicals, much still remains to be done. Thirdly, it calls attention to the depressed state of agriculture relatively to industry, and sees in this an evil to be remedied. Finally, far greater attention is paid in this latest encyclical to international economic questions than in Rerum Novarum or even Quadragesimo Anno.One Catholic M.P. appears to have found in the new encyclical support for the Welfare State as it exists in Britain to-day, whilst a correspondent writing to one of the Catholic papers has suggested that countries wishing to put the social encyclicals into practice would do well to copy our National Health Service.
Priest and People in South Africa
Authors: Braithwaite Guy 
Published: July 2007

In this article I want to examine some of the obstacles which stand in the way of mutual understanding between white priests and black people in Southern Africa today. Initially I had intended to discuss the African and the Gospel preached to him in a more impersonal way, in terms of contrasted cultural backgrounds. As will appear, this has not proved possible, for, at least in the Republic of South Africa, the giving and receiving of Christian truth is complicated at every turn less by the cultural inheritance of the giver or the receiver than by the colour of his skin.Perhaps the chief obstacle to the missionary’s fulfilling his task is his own ignorance. This ignorance may be of the customs and languages of his people: a deficiency which missionaries throughout the world learn to contend with by imaginative hard work. At the same time Southern Africa does present particular difficulties in this matter because the African people themselves, unlike, say, the Chinese in the time of Fr Ricci, do not have a clear cut idea of what their culture is. Under the influence of European civilization the old tribal customs are dissolving or else mixing uneasily with what Europe has brought to Africa, some of it good, some of it very bad. With the best will in the world the missionary will often be perplexed.