bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Translations and Liturgical Tradition
Authors: Gorevan Patrick 
Published: July 2007

The perennial question whether translation is, in fact, possible is rooted in ancient religious and psychological doubts on whether there ought to be any passage from one tongue to another. So far as speech is divine and numinous, so far as it encloses revelation, active transmission whether into the vulgate or across the barrier of languages is dubious or frankly evil .... [thus] the belief that three days of utter darkness fell on the world when the Law was translatd into Greek (George Steiner, After Babel).Such reflections may have a place when it comes to the translation of liturgical documents. They may even be required reading before the awesome task be undertaken. It would be indeed unfortunate if the next English version of the Roman Sacramentary in English were to spark off power cuts all over the English-speaking world!Perhaps we need not worry. Recent articles in New Blackfriars by Eamon Duffy and Bruce Harbert have shown that the revised translation of the Roman Missal, now in draft form, shows some interesting improvements on the 1973 version: greater fidelity to the cadence, the nuances and, above all, the meaning of the original; a distancing from the Pelagian optimism which characterised the earlier translations and a return to the true Roman liturgical style: simplicity encrusted in a majestic flow and rhythm. In this article I would like to draw attention to the challenge this sort of translation faces: that of being faithful to the liturgical tradition.Many of the ‘ordinary-speech’ translations of liturgical texts in the last twenty-five years have been faulted for falling short of the living tradition of the liturgy, reflecting rather the prevailing idiom and ethos.
Von Balthasar and the Problem of Being
Authors: Davies Oliver 
Published: July 2007

The ‘question of Being’ is in a sense deeply against the spirit of the age since the rise of hermeneutics has substantially led to the eclipse of a traditional metaphysics of the self and the world. The central role of ontology in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar therefore makes him appear as a figure who is deeply against the grain of much current thinking, and who stands as a bulwark in defence of traditional, or classical, perspectives.We can trace two primary sources for the role of Being in von Balthasar’s theology. The first is Martin Heidegger, whose vocabulary of Seinsvergessenheit (‘forgetfulness of Being’) sounds throughout von Balthasar’s discussions of Being. The very centrality of Being and of the Ontological Difference (which von Balthasar reads as a thomistic real distinction), is a sign of von Balthasar’s debt to the German philosopher, even if he proves highly critical of many aspects of the heideggerian project in its particularity.’ By far the more important influence is that of Thomas Aquinas, who is discussed in a section from the fourth volume of the English translation (The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity) and again in the fifth (The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modem Age). According to von Balthasar, ‘what Thomas does is to use beauty to define being’. This is a resonant statement indeed, since, to a not inconsiderable extent, it holds also for von Balthasar himself and the whole of his Herrlichkeit project. Time and again during these central volumes, von Balthasar will return to the theme of Being as that which governs the most fundamental aspects of aesthetics, philosophy and theology, as well as the understanding of the human and the grounding of human experience.
Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Hans Urs von Balthasar was very clear that he owed his most distinctive theological insights to Adrienne von Speyr. ‘On the whole I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated’; she often gave him suggestions for sermons ‘but only rarely ... did she read my books’; ‘following her advice’ he took the extremely painful decision to leave the Society of Jesus; he ‘strove to bring [his] way of looking at Christian revelation into conformity with hers’; and although she has no part in the writing, without her ‘the basic perspective of Herrlichkeit would never have existed’ (First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, 1981, page 13). ‘Today, after her death, her work appears far more important to me than mine, and the publication of her still-unpublished writings takes precedence over all personal work of my own’. He predicted, scornfully, that theologians would try to disentangle his insights from hers. Those who read the volumes of Herrlichkeit as they came out in 1961-67 (I was impelled towards them by the enthusiasm of Cornelius Ernst and Donald MacKinnon), of course, knew little or nothing about his indebtedness to von Speyr. Indisputably, some of his most characteristic themes draw heavily on her mystical experiences; other motifs, however, that are central and of great interest, seem independent of his meeting her.There is as yet no proper biography. Born in 1902, in the Swiss Jura, in a comfortably-off family of doctors, clergymen and merchants, settled in Basel for centuries, Adrienne von Speyr was brought up as a Protestant.
Von Balthasar as Biblical Theologian and Exegete
Authors: Riches John 
Published: July 2007

‘[T]heology in the Bible can have no fundamentally different form from later theology in the Church: each is an interpretative act of standing and circling around a midpoint that can indeed be interpreted, but is always in need of interpretation and has never been exhaustively interpreted.’Balthasar’s affirmation of the identity between the theology of the Bible and later church theology, like so much of his writing and work, poses a fundamental challenge to powerful tendencies in the contemporary church, both Protestant and Catholic, at the same time as it claims to be in harmony with the tradition itself. Where Protestant theology from Ritschl and Hamack wants to draw a sharp line between the Bible and the theology of the early church, Balthasar claims a continuity which sees in both the same process of reflection on the relation of the ‘Christ-event’ to the history of God’s love in the Old Covenant and the same interpretative effort to express the centra! mystery in the language of their contemporaries: Jewish or Hellenistic. If Catholic ‘school’ theology wants to emphasise the nature of theology as the formulation and exposition of ‘truths to be believed’, Balthasar asserts that theology, both in the Bible and the Fathers, is part of an inexhaustible and never-ending process of reflection on the experience of grace in the encounter between the Word made flesh and the community of believers. Such an experience of the outpouring of the divine love can never be encompassed by a reading of the Bible as a collection of prooftexts or what Balthasar calls a ‘mere “fundamentalism” of facts of salvation’, for all such attempts at meditation on and expression (Auswortung) of the divine reality fall under the law of the deus semper maior they can never exhaust the, reality of the divine mystery.
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Ethos of Von Balthasar's Theo‐drama
Authors: Murphy Francesca A. 
Published: July 2007

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is about the good. Its conception of Christian moral life is set ‘after Christendom’ and directed to a ‘post-Christian’ culture. If the Theo-Drama becomes central to the way that Christians live in the post-modern world, what will their ethos be like?‘Christendom’ is Christianity as an achieved political strategy: at the end of the game, the board should look like Aquinas’ On Princely Government. Aquinas’s natural law theory is embedded in Aristotle’s idea of the city as directed to a common good by its ruler. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are authoritative for him. Von Balthasar has very little to say about Christendom. The ethics of the Theo-Drama does not hinge on an idea of natural law.According to von Balthasar, pre-Christian cultures found the sacred in the cosmos. With the Incarnation, he says, the sacred is relocated to the person of Christ. Mediaeval Christendom assimilated cosmic religiosity into a Biblical framework. But the footprints of God in the cosmos did not lead all the way to Golgotha. Luther was not in error when he brought this “crisis to consciousness”. Von Balthasar claims that post-Christian culture is desacralised: Great Pan is dead, and the Piper at the gates of dawn cannot now be invoked even by Van Morrison. Post-Christian man has to make a choice: either the physicist’s universe and a technocratic state or the person of Christ. This is not a matter of cultural progression or regression: after the Incarnation, God makes himself less clearly present in nature.
The Transparency of Grace: Bernanos and the Priesthood
Authors: White Allan 
Published: July 2007

I must withdraw so that God can touch the people whom chance places on my way, people that he loves. My presence is as indiscrete as if I were to be discovered between two lovers or between two friends.Simone WeilThe Catholic faith of Georges Bemanos was simple if not uncritical. He claimed to be thoroughly of the Church yet he was dissatisfied with many aspects of its temporal existence. He sometimes rejected classification as a Catholic writer, regarding himself as a writer who was also Catholic. His books were not designed for a restricted audience, but were a kind of wayside preaching of the mysterious way of providence, and the dangers to humanity when God was written out of the story of its life.His works were not designed to promote the self-protective certainties of contemporary bourgeois Catholicism. His clerical heroes, in particular, were all John the Baptist figures, raised up in the rural desert to uncover the superficialities of a compromised urban clerical Catholicism: la confiture de Saint Sulpice, as he allegedly referred to it. A truly Catholic existence lived under the unrelenting sun of divine grace was a demanding profession. Bemanos’ religion was for heroes and saints. Their heroism was their commitment to truth, their fidelity to the gospel in the smallest and most ordinary things of life, and their unstinting, sacrificial, gift of themselves in the self-abandonment of love for God and those whom he had made. Bemanos’ Church was the communion of saints, a place of exchange where ashes become fire and deserts bloom.
‘The Time of the Saints Always Comes’
Authors: Edney Mark 
Published: July 2007

Having imprudently decided to speak to you tonight about a country in which I have never set foot ... an authentic inhabitant of which I’m not at all sure I’ve ever met... in short, since I decided to speak to you about the saints and sanctity, the miracle, the true ... incontestable miracle would be that you manage to listen to me without boredom.The words could seem forced coming from someone whose novels were famous for their saintly characters, whose personal devotion to the cult of the saints was prodigious, and who was given to repeating that ‘our Church is the Church of the Saints’ and ‘the time of the saints always comes.’ But there in Tunisia in 1947, a year before his death, giving a talk to religious sisters, George Bernanos was not being falsely modest. Talking or writing about saints or sanctity he had been doing for much of a lifetime, but he had not for that become certain that he was altogether justified in doing so nor that his contemporaries would or should be prepared to listen to him on the subject. Francois Mauriac once said of Bernanos, ‘the misfortune of not being a saint, which we hardly suffer from at all, he assumed in our place and for us.’ If Mauriac was correct, then we would have to conclude that Bernanos failed his favourite subject, or at least in the purpose for which he had taken it up. For more surely his intention in both talking and writing about saints and sanctity was to make us reassume that misfortune ourselves. It is an historical question to know whether his contemporaries had; it is much more pertinent to know whether his present-day readers might.
Fascism and British Catholic Writers 1924–1939: Part 1
Authors: Morris Kevin L. 
Published: July 2007

The relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs investigating.George OrwellPower is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.Jacob BurckhardtChrist’s Kingdom was a counter kingdom.John Henry NewmanIt has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.
Fascism and British Catholic Writers 1924–1939: Part 2
Authors: Morris Kevin L. 
Published: July 2007

One of the best guides through the territory of the pro-Fascist sympathies of the British Catholic literati is Robert Speaight, who, in his biography of Belloc and his autobiography, achieved a dispassionate view of 1930s English Catholicism, while making no secret of his own moderate temperamental inclination to the Right, even admitting to having been attracted to Action Franchise. Speaking of the 1930s Catholic intelligentsia he remarks:
It was characteristic of a common train of thought that one of the most interesting ventures of [the Catholic publisher] Sheed and Ward was entitled Essays in Order, and that Order was the name of a . . . [Catholic] magazine ... we were so impatient with the shibboleths of the Left that the sophistries of the Right ... left us relatively undisturbed. The mystique of ‘order’ was worked for considerably more than it was worth, with an illegitimate extrapolation from the theological to the political field.He refers to both the influence of continental Rightists and that of the Church in teaching Catholics to fear Communism. Of Belloc he observes he had ‘nothing but contempt for the representative government. ... he seemed to think that, on the whole, fascism was a good thing for foreigners.’
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: VI‐Pro Foco Non Foro
Authors: Walters Hugh 
Published: July 2007

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,Though you have shelters and institutions,Precarious lodgings while the rent is paidSubsiding basements where the rat breedsOr sanitary dwellings with numbered doorsOr a house a little better than your neighbour’s.When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’What will you answer? ‘We all dwell togetherTo make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community?’And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.(T.S. Eliot: Choruses from the Rock)Social justice, which treats the common good as a purpose of action, and brings all the virtues into our relationships with others, is not the only requirement of living in society, but some understanding of it is fundamental, both to liberal societies and to those of a more ancient stamp. Social justice incorporates the question of distribution of wealth, of how to deal with possessions, property, things. The Church has recently uncovered the role of the laity in her understanding of the Christian life, and this aspect of social justice can perhaps be regarded as especially the province of lay people, who deal with the world of ‘ordinary life’: the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. It is not unreasonable to regard these aspects as central to modem life and indeed to Christian spirituality and philosophy. ‘For instance, my sense of myself as a householder, father of a family, holding down a job, providing for my dependents; all this can be the basis of my sense of dignity.’
Italy in the High Middle Ages 1150–1309
Authors: Navone John 
Published: July 2007

The Europe of the High Middle Ages (1150-1309) was principally divided between the Latin-speaking peoples and the Germanic peoples. Although the latter had once invaded and momentarily subjected the Latins, the attraction of the latter’s originally Mediterranean culture had conquered the invaders. The universal language of western Europe had become Latin. Despite the importance of the Germanic peoples, there is no doubt that Latin and its derivatives so dominated the cultural life of Europe that, if one were obliged to find a single adjective with which to qualify the word ‘Europe’ for this period, one would choose ‘Latin,’ and describe the whole as ‘Latin Europe.’France and Italy led Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This may seem strange. Their cultural and military preeminence and their capacity to influence other parts of western Europe seem odd when their internal constitutions are examined. During the twelfth century French law spread far beyond her frontiers, yet France herself boasted no monarchy or state comparable to that of Plantagenet England, Norman southern Italy, or even the declining German Empire. The typical Italian state that produced Europe’s common law (ius commune) and published its most elaborate statutes was an urban republic, tiny when compared to the states of Spain, to England, and to Germany’s provinces, not to speak of Empire.But the size of political units was not the principal criterion of inventiveness or importance in this period. In Spite of the Hohenstaufen revival, the German Empire had been irreparably weakened by the alliance of the Roman Church, the German nobility and the Italian towns.
Aquinas on the Trinity
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

That God is one and three is, of course, for Aquinas a profound mystery which we could not hope to know apart from divine revelation, but we can only begin to understand what he has to say about it if we recognise that for him God is a profound mystery anyway. There are people who think that the notion of God is a relatively clear one; you know where you are when you are simply talking about God whereas when it comes to the Trinity we move into the incomprehensible where our reason breaks down. To understand Aquinas it is essential to see that for him our reason has already broken down when we talk of God at all—at least it has broken down in the sense of recognising what is beyond it. Dealing with God is trying to talk of what we cannot talk of, trying to think of what we cannot think. Which is not to say that it involves nonsense or contradiction.This similarity is sometimes obscured for us by the fact that Aquinas thinks we can prove the existence of God by natural reason whereas such unaided natural reason could tell us nothing of the Trinity. This, however, does not, for him, make the latter a mystery where the former is not, for he thought that to prove the existence of God was not to understand God but simply to prove the existence of a mystery. His arguments for the existence of God are arguments to show that there are real questions to which we do not and cannot know the answer.
Coercion in Augustine and Disney
Authors: Cavanaugh William T. 
Published: July 2007

“He’s way into the merchandising. It makes me crazy because you can’t escape it.” This is the way the mother of a four-year-old described herself faced with 1997’s blitzkrieg of product tie-ins associated with Disney’s movie Hercules. The same syndicated newspaper article from which the above quote is taken introduces a selection of this merchandise (which includes such must-haves as glow-in-the-dark Hercules shorts and an official Hercules silver coin) with the following: “OK, maybe you can’t afford to shower your offspring with all 7,000 official ‘Hercules’ tie-in products. But here’s a sample of the superhero merchandise that your kid’s best friend soon will be bringing to show and tell. Not that you should feel guilty, of course...”Wink wink, ha ha. Surely the woman who claims Hercules is inescapable is indulging in hyperbole, as am I when I tell my students that Disney merchandising is evidence that we do not live in a free country. Nevertheless, one can observe that the woman quoted above is not alone in feeling coerced by Disney magic. I was struck, for example, by the reaction of the press last year to the boycott of Disney launched by the Southern Baptist Convention. One article begins with a long list of Disney owned networks, publishers, sports franchises, music producers, etc., capped by the categorical statement from a Smith Barney analyst, “Disney blankets our culture, and it’s impossible to avoid.” Even many of the Baptists interviewed acknowledged that they felt compelled to continue frequenting many of the heads of the Disney hydra.
The Bishop of Rome Revisited
Authors: Jones David Albert 
Published: July 2007

The Jewish community in Rome in the first century was indeed very large (some tens of thousands) and not unified but divided between several central synagogues. The early Christian community in Rome was also large, sprawling and diverse, accustomed to receive incomers from all parts of the world and somewhat subject to factions. It would have been difficult to exercise leadership effectively over such a body. This is not in dispute. What is at issue is simply and solely the question of whether, within Rome in the first century, there was an office of president of the college of ministers, that is, the office of a single presiding bishop of the church in Rome.Dr Duffy writes that ‘we can afford to be honest historians, and let the evidence lead us where it will’. Yet what is at issue is what counts as evidence, and, in particular, whether it is legitimate to use the great wealth of second-century sources as a guide to first century practice. The Shepherd of Hermas says that the role of sending letters to other local churches was proper to Clement. Dr Duffy claims that this assertion ‘seems to imply [he was] the presbyter in charge of foreign correspondence’. If Clement dealt with other churches, are we to presume that this was all he did? The suggestion is left unexamined that Clement had authority to issue letters to other churches because it was he who presided over the local Church of Rome. Should not the fact that there are many other examples of bishops who wrote on behalf of the local church, and that Clement is counted by second century Roman lists as presiding over the local church, count as evidence?