bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Christian Critic and The Cinema
Authors: Lockhart Freda Bruce 
Published: July 2007

Discussion of the impact of Christian criticism on the cinema would be premature. Both are too new. ‘The art of the film is not yet formed’, Herbert Read wrote in his essay Towards a Film Aesthetic (helpfully reprinted in The Cinema 1951: Penguin Books; 2s. 6d.); ‘and to theorise about something which is not yet fully in being may seem the height of pedantic indiscretion.’ Without fixed principles, tradition or terms of reference, critics, like other members of the film body, are still making up the rules of their job as they go along doing it; and among them the Christian critic is a late starter. Conscientious Catholics for too many years have passed the cinema by, neglecting, either from fear of its evil or scorn of its stupidity, to learn the alphabet of the language of moving pictures.Pope Pius XI saw the folly and danger of this attitude already in 1936. But the Catholic community responded slowly to the challenge of his encyclical on films, Vigilanti Cura. Only now is it possible to discern even the rough outlines of a body of Catholic film criticism. Last April, Christian film critics from all parts of the world gathered in Lucerne for a study conference arranged by the O.C.I.C. (Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma). I keenly regret having been prevented at the last moment by illness from being present; for this was a first concerted attempt to define the principles and functions of Christian film criticism.
Saunders Lewis
Authors: Foster Idris 
Published: July 2007

In ‘A note on Welsh Education’ which he contributed to Blackfriars for March, 1948, Mr Saunders Lewis has described how, in the nineteenth century, ‘nonconformity became the very nationhood of Wales’. ‘Its entire cultural life’, he wrote, ‘was centred in the chapel. . . . Religion was three-quarters of life; it triumphed in poverty and over poverty and ennobled the bitter, ill-requited toil on land, in quarry, mine ... The education of this people was rooted in its religious and social life: its content was its evangel, its medium the Welsh language. While the society lived and kept its unity, these two were safe. During the past sixty years, however, that unity has gradually been breaking down; the ‘ideal and authority’ of the society have been destroyed. ‘Middle-class, worldly ideals, the impact of a wider, modern culture, conquered the religious unity of the Methodist peasantry.’It would be difficult to disagree with that analysis. Wales is now going through the final stages of the disintegration of its nonconformist nationhood. Mr Saunders Lewis is in many ways the most influential personality in Wales today. The names of the contributors to a recent volume on his work are a clear proof of the extent of this influence. The editor, a Congregationalist minister, reminds us that Mr Lewis has enthusiastic disciples, ardent admirers, loyal friends—and enemies. For at least a quarter of a century he has been, to quote the words of the seventeenth-century writer Morgan Llwyd, ‘dirgelwch i rai i’w ddeall ac i eraill i w watwar, he has indeed been a disturbing mystery to many and to object of myopic scorn to others.
The Tradition of The Maries in Provence
Authors: Girdlestone C. M. 
Published: July 2007

The frequency of the name Martha in Provence from the eighth century onwards, as well as its rarity elsewhere in the West, is an indirect but significant indication of the cult of the saint who first bore it in those parts. Moreover, two charters of 964 and 967, now in the archives of the Bouches-du-Rhône, mention a terra of St Martha near Tarascon.It is also alleged that there exist no other traditions concerning these saintly personages (Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary Magdalen, Mary Salome, and Mary the mother of James), and no other church has ever claimed them. This has been contradicted by the original opponent of the tradition, the seventeenth-century scholar Launoy, and more recently by Mgr Duchesne. The latter brought forward a number of texts to show that Mary Magdalen, regarded as distinct from Mary of Bethany, had her tomb in Ephesus in the sixth century, and that Lazarus, whom certain traditions also connect with Ephesus, had a tomb in Lamaca, then called Citium, in Cyprus, in the ninth century, and that in 899 his body and that of Mary Magdalen were transferred to Constantinople by Leo VI.
Christian Architecture
Authors: Purcell Donovan 
Published: July 2007

The artistic record of the Church in England over the last hundred years is indeed a dismal one. Dull, drab and even ugly churches, in what passes for a period style, are furnished with clumsy woodwork, characterless plaster statues and fussy, over-decorated altars, exhibiting so often a general air of tawdriness which can scarcely fail to depress and may actually repel a seeker after peace and beauty in God’s house. There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions; but no more than enough of them to prove the rule and to show the tremendous opportunities which lie within our grasp.The reasons for this unhappy state of affairs are not difficult to discover or to understand. The restoration of the English Hierarchy, and the emergence of the Church from obscurity, took place at a time when artistic taste in this country had sunk to its lowest ebb. The classical tradition had had its last flourish in the first two decades of the century, in the form which we now call the Regency style. But it flourished then not as the accepted tradition in which all men worked and within which the genius of the time found new expression, but as one of several styles, an alternative to more exotic forms borrowed from the East, or to the revived ‘Gothick’ manner. There was no longer any accepted grammar of architecture, or any universal standard of artistic criticism. The Romantic Movement in literature had been followed in the graphic arts, and the paintings of Claude and Poussin had fired the imagination of patrons of architecture.
Catholicism in Africa
Authors: Mathew David 
Published: July 2007

This brief introduction to the African number of Blackfriars can only suggest some lines of thought in regard to the progress and future of Catholicism among the African peoples. The following notes relate to the territories under British administration which lie between the Sahara and the Zambesi. The first and in some respects the happiest impact of the Catholic Faith on the African mind belongs to the period of the pioneer missionaries, largely French in their personnel and to an even greater extent French in their direction, working in a series of wholly tribalised societies. In those areas where there existed a powerful and hereditary chiefship it was often not difficult for the missionary to persuade the chief and his councillors that his coming offered no threat to established African authority. Speaking generally, the chief did not himself become a Catholic, but he was the missionary’s equal and friend and the recipient of much wise advice. It was within this framework that there was built up the system of catechists and the practice of giving such teaching to the children as was necessary to enable them to lead a Catholic life. It may be said that the survival of tribalism and its modern counterpart, the sense of African nationhood, are conditions favourable to the development of the Catholic Church in Africa. Detribalism on the other hand is inevitably unfavourable and no group is more in need and less accessible than the detribalised urban proletariat.No religion will appeal to the African who is still working on the land unless it respects ancient traditions and is not inimical to his pride of nationhood, whether that be Ibo or Yoruba, Baganda, Bahaya, Kikuyu or Chagga. This national consciousness should never be impeded either in the African priest or in the African layman.
What Can Missions Achieve?
Authors: Magrath Oswin 
Published: July 2007

In spite of a steady tradition in the official documents of the Church, there has long existed, and still persists, much vagueness about the aims of the Missions. This has its ill-effects on the methods and on the missionaries themselves, and on the support given to the Missions by the Church at large. A clear view of the matter is therefore of the first importance.The encyclical, Evangelii praecones, of Pius XII, issued on June 2nd, 1951, and that of his predecessor, Rerum Ecclesiae (of which the first commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary), have given powerful directives in regard to Missions, and their prescriptions should remove many misconceptions. A more precise theology of the Missions is in the course of development, namely a branch of theology dealing with the expansion of the visible Church.The fact which dominates the whole subject of Missions must be the purpose for which they are undertaken. Missionary activity is not synonymous with deep religious conviction as such, for there are many religions which have the character of a closed national or caste group, not easily permitting expansion beyond its limits. Such are most primitive religions, and some others such as Hinduism. Catholic Missions have a definite aim, and this has been stated clearly in the recent encyclical: ‘As everyone knows, these sacred expeditions have as their principal aim to bring the light of Christian truth more clearly to new peoples, to gain new Christians. The ultimate goal which they must strive to reach, and which must always be kept before the mind, is that of establishing the Church solidly among other peoples, and of giving it a hierarchy chosen from among the indigenous population.’ The establishment of the visible Church is the aim of the Missions.
Education in British East Africa
Authors: Walsh Richard M. 
Published: July 2007

The object of this article is to present a picture of educational work among the African population, particularly that undertaken by the Church in British East Africa, with special reference to Tanganyika Territory, since the school organisation and the various problems connected with it in Tanganyika can be taken as typical of educational work in the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Kenya.These three territories, which are as large as Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and the British Isles put together, meet about the shores of Lake Victoria. The total population is 17,600,000, of whom 7,500,000 are in Tanganyika and roughly 5,000,000 in each of the other two territories. The European population is very small in proportion, and is made up mostly of Government officers, save in Kenya where there is a white settlement of nearly 20,000. There are 11,000 Goans and an Indian community of nearly 170,000, small in numbers but economically very influential, since most of the trading, in Tanganyika in particular, is in Indian hands. The natural African unit is a tribal one, each with its own taboos, customs, laws, languages and chiefs; and where the administrative boundaries cut across tribal areas or group them into districts or reserves, the tribal organisation, with the chiefs’ barazas, is respected as far as possible.The three territories which constitute British East Africa and the island of Zanzibar come within different political categories. Uganda and Zanzibar are Protectorates, Kenya is mainly a Colony with a narrow coastal strip formerly belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar and now a protectorate area, and Tanganyika is a British Mandate. The territorial boundaries are entirely the result of the European occupation of East and Central Africa at the end of the last century.
The Dying God
Authors: White Victor 
Published: July 2007

It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.’ (John II, 50.) You will remember that those words are attributed by the Fourth Gospel to Caiaphas, and that it tells us that ‘he spoke not of himself, but being the high priest for that year, he prophesied’. We are told that it was this official utterance of the High Priest that decided the authorities to put Jesus of Nazareth to death.This remarkable fact is nowhere mentioned, so far as I can recall, in the twelve large volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Yet the pronouncement of Caiaphas might well have served as a motto for the whole work. Frazer, combining encyclopaedic knowledge with rare literary grace and dramatic effect, and with much of the excitement of a detective story, set out to solve a mystery—the mystery of a haggard, hunted ‘priest of the wood’ by the shores of Lake Nemi long ago, a priest who had plucked a golden bough, a priest who had murdered his predecessor, and who was now sleeplessly awaiting his own murderer and successor. And you remember how clue leads to clue as Frazer’s vast researches fan out into space and time, ransacking the annals of history, archaeology, the literature of all nations, comparative religion, anthropology, folklore. Slowly there emerges the hint of a worldwide pattern of belief and practice according to which it is expedient that one should die for the people that the whole nation perish not; that the slayer and the slain should alike be some embodiment of divinity, a divine king or priest or his son, or some representative or substitute or effigy, whose death and torment is somehow necessary if the life or power which he embodies, and on which the people depend, is to survive or revive.
The Real Answer to Communism
Authors: Hyde Douglas 
Published: July 2007

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.
The Enigma of Leon Bloy
Authors: Havard‐Williams Margaret 
Published: July 2007

The readers of Léon Bloy can be divided, on the whole, into two opposing camps. Those who read his work primarily for its religious content see him as a pious Christian who vehemently protested against the evils of the modem world; and, even if his imperfections are recognised, few critics have attempted to explain or even reconcile the conflicting tendencies of his character. There are others, however, who frankly scoff at his Christian principles, finding it impossible to believe in the religious sincerity of a man who could live, during the greater part of his life, on the generosity of his friends, and could cover his enemies with violent scorn and abuse.Few writers have penetrated very far into the motives and principles of this puzzling man: he is either dismissed as a literary joke, or accepted unquestioningly for the sincerity of his faith. The complexity of his character is, nevertheless, bewildering. The more we study his correspondence and diaries, the more uncertain we become of what he is setting out to achieve. Bloy seems to have lived his life on two distinct levels. He certainly saw himself as a modem St Francis, an apostle of poverty in a world of materialism, reduced to begging and borrowing from friends to provide his daily bread; yet contemporary records show that he spent a great deal of money on absinthe and amusements, and his poverty could undoubtedly have been mitigated by more careful management and foresight. How can Léon Bloy, fighter and hater of his fellow men, be reconciled with the Christian evangelist he claimed to be? How can the devout Catholic have been attracted by some of the most obscene tendencies in the literature of his day? The answer to all these problems can, I suggest, be found in a deeper penetration into the piety and the religious outlook of Bloy himself.
Science and the Trinity
Authors: Hastings Cecily 
Published: July 2007

When we try to make contact, for the purpose of teaching and explaining the faith, with the pagan mind of our generation, something we might call ‘scientific mindedness’ at once arises as a barrier. (The inverted commas are strictly necessary.) We are not speaking of the truly scientific attitude but of a by-product, to be found both among scientists and among those several removes away from any field of scientific research. I do not mean by ‘scientific mindedness’ simply the attitude that demands tangible proof for every assertion made. Neither do I mean actual knowledge of recent scientific discoveries and theories, requiring particular answers to particular objections. The difficulty is really one of basic mental patterns. The more we are pre-occupied, as Christians, with the truths of revelation, the more these truths will determine the shape of our thinking and our approach to all questions, not only doctrinal ones. The unbeliever is not, of course, so shaped in his mind. But this naturally does not mean that his mind has no determinate shape. The basic mental patterns of the unbelievers of our day are, as we all know, to a large extent laid down by ideas stemming from the scientific discoveries and theories of die last hundred years. It does not matter that a particular individual has perhaps read very litde, even in popular works, of what these discoveries and dieories actually are. He absorbs his mental outlook from them none the less.But the fact that his actual knowledge is probably slight deprives him of the riches of the scientific outlook, its humility before facts and its acute realisation of its own limitations, and leaves him with illegitimate by-products—a vague assumption of materialism, a vague conviction of the near-omniscience and nearomnipotence of ‘scientists’, and a vague certainty that practically every teaching that has not come directly from ‘the scientists’ has at some time, somehow, been discredited and disproved by them. Against this background we try to trace the truths of revelation.
Mental Illness
Authors: McFie B. S. 
Published: July 2007

Our conception of mental illness has undergone a great change during the last half-century and many old misconceptions have been discarded. Lunacy, a purely legal term, which corresponds to no medical diagnosis, has slipped into the background and mental illness is recognised as a wide range of conditions of varying seriousness about which there is a growing body of knowledge and for which, to an increasing extent, appropriate treatment can be given.The effect of this change is striking. Early in the century the only recognised provision for mental illness was to be found in hospitals known as lunatic asylums, which were administered under the 1890 Lunacy Act. These hospitals were designed for and restricted to persons who, owing to their mental condition, were incapabe of managing their own affairs and who, for their own safety or that of others, needed to be placed under care and treatment. Treatment was legally provided for, but in practice the emphasis was on care and protection, and since admission to hospital meant the deprivation of the patient’s liberty it followed naturally that elaborate provision was made for the prevention of abuse. It followed equally naturally that relatives and friends were reluctant to invoke the Act. The result was that the only hospitals able to provide resident treatment were closed to many who would gladly have taken advantage of it, and the Lunacy Act became only too often a barrier to treatment.
The Catholic Church and Ecumenism
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

A Reviewer in the August number of Theology has written that ‘Rome’s tragic rejection of the Ecumenical Movement is one of the challenges of our day, and it has yet to be faced and met’. By its context, a review of Salmon’s Infallibility of the Church, this rather cryptic sentence seems to imply that the nature of the Church (as Catholics conceive it) makes Catholicism essentially incapable of absorbing the spirit of Ecumenism. If that were actually the case it would be truer to say that Ecumenism rejects Rome, not that Rome has rejected the Ecumenical Movement.In order to test the validity of this judgment it is necessary to define what constitutes the essential spirit of Ecumenism, and what are the aims to which it gives birth. But it is precisely here that a difficulty lies, because the Ecumenical Movement has been fluid in its development, originating in a spontaneous desire for Christian unity, due partly to the threat of world war during the first decade of the century, and partly to the problems set to missionary effort by divisions among Christians. The double source of the desire for unity resulted in the emergence of two tendencies within the growing movement. In one, emphasis was laid upon co-operation between Christian bodies, in spite of differences of doctrine.
Communism in Britain
Authors: Hyde Douglas 
Published: July 2007

He Communist Party in Britain has at this moment only some 35,000 members. This makes it sound small by comparison with such Communist Parties as those of, say, France or Italy, which are millions strong. But if such a comparison is to be of any real significance we need to observe the different roles and the different circumstances within which they function.In France and Italy there are no mass Socialist movements. The result is that the biggest mass working-class party there is the Communist Party. Under such circumstances the party consists of a hard core of well-indoctrinated, highly disciplined members, who know what they want, where they are going and exactly how they are going to get there, and a great mass of less well instructed members who follow the party ‘line’ most of the time but cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as well-instructed Marxists. The role of the hard core within such a party is to try to leaven the entire lump, to raise its ‘Marxist-theoretical understanding’ (to use the Communists’ own jargon) and to keep it constantly active on behalf of Communist policies.In Britain, the workers’ mass movement is Labour-led and the Communist Party is small. Its role in such circumstances is precisely that of the hard core in the continental-type Communist Party, i.e. to make the great working-class mass as Marxist as possible and to activise it on behalf of Communism. Had the Labour Party been prepared to admit the Communist Party as an affiliated body (as it once hoped would be the case, and for which it runs campaigns from time to time), the job would have been made much easier for it. But early in its life it was disaffiliated and so, whilst seeing itself as the Marxist hard core of the wider Labour movement, it must do its leavening from outside, so far as the political wing of the movement is concerned, although it can work from within in the case of most of the trades unions and the co-operative movement.