bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Martyrs
Authors: Leitch N. S. 
Published: July 2007

When, from the clouds of our actual vantage-point, we consider the date 1535, we are immediately conscious, because of the glorious event which illuminates this present year of suspense, of a scaffold and a block. Four hundred years intervene, and we shall perhaps congratulate ourselves on their passage, since the use of the headsman's axe as a means of religious persuasion has vanished with them and physical danger in the practise of our faith is at an end. We look back with humble reverence and gratitude to that scaffold set in the midst of our country and our history, where the two Blessed Martyrs, now to be canonized, welcomed the ultimate opportunity; and although we may be thankful that such an opportunity comes no more to Englishmen in England (since, by a curious paradox, we would often more willingly choose a life of heroism than a heroic death), we reverence them the more for their fortitude in a trial we are spared.Their fame shines for us across the centuries, and we love them for holiness and wisdom, for wit and prevailing courage, timeless attributes displayed by them in a vanished time; for everything of that day has disappeared, the frame of life and its preoccupations, the look and sound of it. Gone is that world of individual efforts and harvests, and we think of it as a pastoral picture painted in clear tones, the green English scene enlivened by the peasant in his homespun, made ceremonial by the daily silks and velvets of the great. Its arguments and sufferings, its discoveries and abuses, are only knowledge for us.But it was a time like this in which we live; new power, new danger, and new tyranny were abroad, and established things were threatened with disruption.
Professor Max Drennan
Authors: Stockley W. F. P. 
Published: July 2007

The scholarship and wit, the lovable personality and frank geniality of the late Professor Drennan have been spoken of in two notices in the Times, the month of his death, January, 1935.Therein, too, it is noted that, in his England, at seventeen he adopted Catholicism “with characteristic enthusiasm.” From these convertites there is much matter to be learnt, said Jaques. There is; and from their wandering away; and from their return. ‘Twas so with Drennan, truly a wanderer from his birth. Bom in home county Banbury, he had taught in Ceylon under the Oblate Fathers, and had been in the United States before I first knew him, when he and I taught together, in Canada in 1903. Later he was Professor of English in Galway, at the time of the European War and of the Irish Rising of 1916. And, last of all, he was in Johannesburg (from 1917), where for nigh twenty years he lived; and where he died. In South Africa he said he at last found a home wherein he could settle down. But he kept in touch with England, as a member of the Authors’ Club, London; which he joined, he said, “in the impossible event of my going over.” And he was a not infrequent jester in Punch. His humour, if it had a distinctive touch, may, perhaps, be said to be specially English; although Protestant Irish, seemingly all Celtic, was his descent. Persons of mind have praised M.D.’s Punch pieces. In Canada, he was The Canadian Month’s “Eno Poppyhock,” with his “Olla Podrida,” finding “irrational” the almanack's June 25 succeeding June 24. “It is also monotonous. Why should April 2nd always follow April 1st? Is there any reason why it should?
The Mystical Body
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: July 2007

In the meandering of mankind through the ages the stream of vitality has flown back and forth from one system of life to its opposite. At present we seem to be in a transitional period when the main stream is sweeping back from individualism to an extreme collectivism. Since the Reformation men have done violence to their social nature by attempting to work out their own salvation independently of others. There were times when this seemed to be the only way of achieving any vital movement, since the alternative of cooperation and corporal unity lay apparently dead among a heap of legalities and impositions from a tyrannous authority. The reign of the individualist, however, though it made many new and valuable conquests, could not endure for long, for of its nature it was doomed to fall to pieces. Now we see a return to co-operation, to the united efforts of many men sharing one ideal. This is glaringly obvious in the dictatorships supported by the enthusiasm of the people, and in the growing solidarity of Communism; but it appears in religious spheres as well, in such movements as those of the Groups or leading to the absurdity of Christian and Jew attempting to find a common religious basis in a symposium entitled “In Spirit and Truth.”Though the true Christianity of the Catholic Church has always been essentially social, it was inevitable that it should have been influenced to some extent by the common outlook on life. The stress was laid on the relations between the individual soul and God, while the idea of brotherhood in Christ, though not forgotten, was put in the background. The return of vitality in other spheres to the sense of fellowship and co-operation of men in society has been the occasion of a revival of interest in the social character of the Church.
Lay Thought on American Catholic Action
Authors: McLarney A. 
Published: July 2007

Americans, as a result of regional divergencies, are often more remote in culture from each other than from England or even from the Continent. But the roots of our culture are Protestant and English and there is, moreover, a similarity of spiritual background and problem which unites American and English Catholics. We are confronted by the same religious apathy within the fold; we must combat the same ignorance from without. Americans are beginning to realize how different would have been the background and the atmosphere of our country had the French and Spanish continued to settle North America; not because these settlers were Latins, but because they were steeped in a culture engendered by the living tradition of the Latin Church. The friars in California, the French in the south and in Canada might have moulded a people to beauty, as M. Maritain says, and we would not be in our present dire need of traditional influences and customs which must become aged in wood or stone or generation. Ere they were forged, our links with a Catholic past were broken by the Yankee ascendancy. In England the surviving faithful few held the broken ends together. So it follows that the culture of the American is more bankrupt than the culture of the average Englishman. But we may take heart, for as Mgr. William J. Kerby told the students of the National Catholic Schoool of Social Service: “Our Catholic vision of life is wide and our countiy's need of that vision is profound. We bring the best in motive.“*As the work of the lay apostolate swings into the mental orbit of the earnest American Catholic, there are certain high lights which illumine his vision, certain dim torches which would bum bravely if given the impetus.
The Root of Our Differences
Authors: Quinlan John 
Published: July 2007

As articles and comments in Blackfrlars have testified from time to time, Catholic opinion has in some ways become considerably divided. Nevertheless, it seems true to say that there is but one fundamental divergence, of which various controversies are the manifestations. We can group them under three convenient heads: Contemplation v. Activity; Retreat v. Penetration; Authority v. Lay Initiative and Freedom.We suggest that these difficulties might never have arisen or might more easily be solved, if Catholics were to consider in the first place the practical nature of Truth. It is possible to discover a direction for right action even before considering the circumstances of the particular problem. It seems clear, from historical examination, that in nine cases out of ten an outright opinion or answer cannot be other than suspect. The practical characteristics of Truth are detachment, balance, and synthesis, together with a certain bias towards one aspect. Thus, the Church combines in herself the ideas both of authority and liberty, but with a bias towards authority as the basis and preserver of freedom. This description of the practical nature of Truth is validated in the Orders of Nature and Art. The river is stemmed and its vital movement formed by its banks. In Music, as enclosing the sweep and swing of emotional play, we have the bar and the sonata-form. If, beside the idea of Authority, we place the analogues of Form, Institution, Dogma, and beside the idea of Freedom the analogues of Spirit, Vitality, Creativeness, we can see how Order depends on the latter being conserved and made effective by the former. It is the rules which give zest and meaning to the game. Order is Truth.
A Dominican Martyr in Hampshire
Authors: Mott Agnes 
Published: July 2007

Venerable Robert Nutter, O.P.: Martyred at Lancaster, July 26, 1600, “a man of a strong body but of a stronger soul, who rather despised than conquered death, and went before his companion (Mr. Thwing) to the gallows with as much cheerfulness and joy, as if he had been going to a feast, to the astonishment of the spectators.” (Dr. Champney.)In the year 1579, two brothers arrived at the Douai College (Rheims) to pursue their studies for the priesthood. Their names were Robert and John Nutter, of Burnley in Lancashire. After having been ordained priests, they both left France in the year 1582, in order to devote the remainder of their lives to the salvation of their fellow-countrymen in ‘England. John Nutter was shipwrecked off the coast of Suffolk and, being discovered, arrested on suspicion of being a priest. He was imprisoned for two years in the Marshalsea and finally suffered martyrdom at Tyburn on February 12, 1584. The other brother, Robert, appears to have landed on the Hampshire coasts for, on the report of a spy named Dodwell, he frequented the houses of the Hampshire gentry.In those days a price was set upon the head of every seminary priest arriving upon these shores. Discovery meant death to the priest. Those who harboured the priests were liable to be charged as “abettors of treason.” A high place of honour should therefore be accorded to those gentry in Hampshire who received Father Robert Nutter in their homes.
Reasonable Service
Authors: Carpenter Hilary 
Published: July 2007

The Catholic concept of religion is radically different from most others because it is born of the realization that the true function of religion is the unique fulfilment of a need rooted in the very essence of human nature. This difference is shown in practice by the willingness of the Catholic to submit to the guidance of the Church, primarily of course in matters supernatural, whether of Faith or Morals, but also in matters which do not appear to have any direct connection with ‘religion.’ He is ready to recognize the wise authority of the Church in every department of human life whenever the Church sees fit to offer judgment or advice, even though he is aware that such pronouncements are not infallible expressions of revealed truth nor coercive of his assent.Then we are priest-ridden after all? No, decisively no, it is not that. The truth is that the Catholic recognizes the true function of the Church and its true relation to human life. He looks upon the Church not as representing only a section of his life that is rigidly separated from his daily affairs. He looks upon it not merely as a place where he spends a perfunctory half hour or so on a Sunday, not as a sort of sedative and balance to the rush and clamour of secular affairs. He knows full well that it provides the means of fulfilling an urgent need of his very nature. Far from being extrinsic to his ordinary daily life, he knows that it is the only thing that can save human life from becoming in reality the futile meaningless thing it so often appears to be. He knows that without the Church a man is like one blind, groping about aimlessly unaware of the pitfalls on every side, who knows that he is in a desperate plight and without hope.
The Christian as Pioneer
Authors: Shove Herbert 
Published: July 2007

‘I tell you naught for your comfort,Yea, naught for your desire,Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.’(The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton)Father Conrad Pepler has done well to emphasize the sacrifice involved in a return to the land upon which more than one of the older hands at Catholic land propaganda has found it necessary to insist, as against the ‘Arcadian Shepherd’ school on the one hand and the ‘Sound Economic Proposition’ enthusiasts on the other.In the Catholic Truth Society pamphlet on The Catholic Land Movement, the first attempt at systematic public exposition of our aims and motives, the present writer expressed a point of view which he ventures to quote:‘Now while we believe that, whether in the meanwhile we work for or against it, this [the basing of our social system “on the land whence all our subsistence comes and on the labour of our hands which God has ordained as the means thereto”] is the only possible ultimate development, the continued existence of the vast commercio-industrial organization, with its specious offers of wealth, luxury and “convenience,” its false philosophy of ease, “leisure” and mechanical distractions as the ends of human life, and of work as mere irksome toil to be curtailed as much as possible, must remain as a stumbling block and an irresistible temptation to those not supported by true principles in facing the undoubted physical hardships and inconveniences involved in the return to a peasant life. It has been said that no people has ever voluntarily gone out from the city into the wilderness, save under the influence of a religious ideal. Mere economic considerations are not enough.
The Layman and the Mass
Authors: Timmins Antony 
Published: July 2007

Growing side by side with the world-wide movement of Catholic Action there is the ever-spreading liturgical revival. They are but two aspects of the one fact—the mutual co-operation of the faithful among themselves and with their pastors; and they differ in that Catholic Action, of its very nature, includes the liturgical movement. Catholic Action includes corporate activity both ad intra and ad extra: the sanctification of individuals and the defence and advance of Christianity in a semi-pagan world.To push on the external manifestation of Catholic Action without paying due attention to the preliminary of personal sanctity is to make bricks without straw: Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant earn. Furthermore, the interior life must be looked to, to provide inspiration and strength as the cause progresses. There is one outstanding practice of the faithful which gives them a perennial ‘unity without uniformity,’ namely the fundamental act of public external worship of God, as expressed in the sacrifice of the Mass. For, as Fr. Pepler puts it: ‘when we speak of the liturgy, we mean primarily the Mass; and the Mass becomes the essential link of Christian unity.’ ‘Attendance at this ceremony has been imposed as an obligation of membership, so that theoretically the whole Catholic world is present at least once a week. This is the main symbol of the catholicity of the Church.’The Pope has urged time and again that Catholic Action is an apostolate. It procures not only the personal sanctification of him who participates in it (although this is the foundation), but that also of others.
The Approach to Reunion
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

The new regroupings of the future are forming themselves round two clearly defined rallying points. One of these is materialism, which attracts those who have ceased to fix their eyes on a life beyond this life. The other is Christianity, towards which are gravitating those who cannot be satisfied with a materialistic explanation of the world, and who believe that in, and around, and beyond its life lies another and more perfect life, in which we are in some way sharers. The materialist grouping is as yet only a nucleus, but it has a coherent creed, a crusading spirit and definite unity of aim. In strong contrast with this small, active, homogeneous nucleus, steadily extending its circle of influence, is the huge army of Christendom, full of supernatural vitality and heroic effort, but handicapped by internal dissension, reduced sometimes almost to impotence; and unable to move forward in strength and unity on its mission to convert the world to Christ.Is it any wonder that there is an increasing number of men and women in every one of the many sections into which Christendom is divided, who are turning their thoughts more and more to the problem of reunion? They see that to remain as we are, divided and crippled in our efforts, is not merely to court the disaster of being overwhelmed by the forces of pagan materialism, but is a betrayal of our Blessed Lord’s commission, who has bidden us go and teach all nations, not go bewilder them with the multiplicity of our doctrines and the conflict of our many opinions.
Material Thoughts
Authors: Basevi Vincent 
Published: July 2007

There is a material side to Christianity as well as the spiritual foundation; and it is on the material side, as it affects our daily lives and our national interests, that my thoughts dwell at the moment. Where does Christianity touch the major problems of to-day: bad trade, unemployment, poverty, lack of general interest in public affairs, wide-spread corruption, indifference to crime and dishonesty, and finally slaughter—I might almost call it human sacrifice—on our high roads? I have no ready made cure to offer for our troubles; nor can I believe that there is a simple and easy path leading out of the complicated tangle of difficulties surrounding the individual and the nation. I am not prepared to join with those who lightly attribute all evils to the war; for it seems to me that the war, with its call for self-denial and a realization of the existence of man’s duty as well as man’s rights, nearly saved the nation from spiritual decadence. I do believe that there is a way out of our troubles, and that the key to all the problems is to be found in discipline.A nation without religion is a nation without backbone; for sincere religious belief is the only form of discipline by which human nature can be trained to healthy growth. The law, to a certain extent, protects the weak man from his strong neighbour (though this does not apply to-day in the realm of finance): religion protects the weak man and the strong man alike from himself.
Reflections on Reunion
Authors: Farrell Ambrose 
Published: July 2007

Whilst there need be no doubt that the periodical efforts to resuscitate the question of ‘Reunion’ are motived by an earnest desire to re-establish the unity of the Church of Christ under One Head, there is a danger that the very word ‘Reunion’ may be understood in an unorthodox sense, based on a misconception of the Church. To extend sympathy to reunion as something different from Christian unity resting on the firm foundation of Peter would be to hold out a vain expectation calculated to keep those not in communion with the See of Peter away from the true faith. From this point of view stress cannot be laid too heavily on the incontrovertible fact that Catholics and Anglicans are divided on fundamental questions of Faith, and these questions are not solved, and cannot be solved, by conceding that the Reformation was perhaps partly due to the indifference of Catholics themselves. Nor must we run the risk of allowing this essential divergence to be glossed over in the attempt to establish friendly relations with those outside the true fold, even though this be through no fault of their own. If the word ‘reunion’ is taken to imply that the Anglican communion is a branch of the True Vine, or an entity not essentially different from the Roman Church, or that it has a corporate life maintained by Our Lord and His Holy Spirit, then it is a heretical term devoid of orthodox interpretation. In view of possible misunderstandings, therefore, it seems well to offer the following observations.It is perhaps not without significance that in the several letters and decrees of the Holy See on the promotion of Christian unity the term ‘reunion’ itself, as well as the term ‘Church’ as applied to the Anglican body, is avoided.
J. O. C.
Authors: Manson Ælfric 
Published: July 2007

‘Another movement,’ one can hear the weary parish priest exclaim. There are so many movements, societies, guilds, and so on, in Catholic parishes that the sensible thing would seem to be to eliminate some of them rather than to introduce new ones. That is a rational point of view, and largely necessary. But it is clear that the process of selection must be made on the grounds of whether this or that society fulfils an essential and indispensable function or not. The J.O.C. which as yet is only in embryo in England claims that its work is indispensable, and since this view has the strong backing of the Pope, it seems worth while to devote a little attention to it.The radical change in the social system which is the dominating feature of our time compels the attention of religion. The exact details of the future society may be left for imaginative minds to describe. But there are two points about it that may be predicted without undue rashness. The first is that it will be a society in which the working class will have come into its own; the achievement will be difficult; there will be set-backs; but sooner or later it is inevitable that just as the middle class may be taken as the typical, the representative class of the last century, so the workers will become typical and representative of ours. The second point concerns the spiritual character of this new society. We can make some judgment with regard to this by observing the youth of this generation; for the youth of to-day are the citizens of to-morrow. Doubtless conditions here in this respect are less extreme than on the Continent; nevertheless, it is not an imprudent assertion to say that the mass of young workers of both sexes are already very largely secularized.
Understanding the Art of India
Authors: Coomaraswamy Ananda 
Published: July 2007

Works of art have been thought of in two very different ways. According to the modem view, the artist is a special or even abnormal kind of man, endowed with a peculiar emotional sensibility which enables him to see what we call beauty; moved by a mysterious aesthetic urge he produces paintings, sculpture, poetry, or music. These are regarded as a spectacle for the eyes or a gratification for the ear; they can only be enjoyed by those who are called lovers of art, and these are understood to be temperamentally related to the artist, but without his technical ability. Other men are called workmen, and make things which every one needs for use; these workmen are expected to enjoy art, if they are able, only in their spare time.In ideal art, the artist tries to improve upon nature. For the rest, the truth of the work of art is held to be its truth to an external world, which we call nature, and expect the artist to observe. In this kind of art there is always a demand for novelty. The artist is an individual, expressing himself, and so it has become necessary to have books written about every artist individually, for since each makes use of an individual language, each requires explanation. Very often a biography is substituted for the explanation. Great importance is attached to what we call genius, and less to training. Art history is chiefly a matter of finding out the names of artists and considering their relation to one another. The work of art itself is an arrangement of colours or sounds, adjudged good or bad according to whether these arrangements are pleasing or otherwise. The meaning of the work of art is of no significance; those who are interested in such merely human matters are called Philistines.