bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Louis‐Joseph Lebret, O.P. 1897‐1966
Authors: Cosmao Vincent 
Published: July 2007

The Pope’s encyclical on Development, Populorum Progressio, has drawn attention to a man, Père Lebret, who is better known in many parts of the Third World than in Europe and particularly in the English-speaking world, but whose life is, nevertheless, expressive of one of the main trends that have marked the development of humanity and of the Church during the last decades.In marking him out as one of the principal instigators of this encyclical, Paul VI knew better than anyone that he had not intervened in its detailed preparation simply as an expert, but that it was his experience and his life which had given him the essential inspiration for it. And those who knew him realize that his work and thought are one with his life; so much so, that if his writings were to pass away, in the way writings do, there would still remain the mark he has left on the history of his time and the direction which, largely thanks to him, some men and some commissions have given to their life and work.In our present preoccupation with the problem of our relations with the Third World, it would, therefore, seem to be useful to recount the main stages of his life, in order to understand better some of the forces which determine the direction of history in the sense of an ever closer interdependence of nations.
Private Investment in Developing Countries
Authors: Pargeter Mark 
Published: July 2007

The debate on aid to less-developed countries has recently been concentrated in the fields of private charity and government contribution. In the field of private charity there has been an extension of the 1 per cent idea, and schemes have proliferated—Third World First, 1 per cent Group, Good Friday appeal, St Andrewstide appeal. These are all designed to overcome one of the main disadvantages of appealing for money from the individual—the enormous cost of collection. In the field of government contribution the debate has settled in the field of multilateral v. bilateral aiding. The important point at issue here is to ensure that the aid does not become a political football.The debate as it has been conducted, chiefly by men of good will of left-wing persuasions, has left aside the question of how private investment could be integrated or used for the development of the less-developed countries. The words that go round are those of moral obligation and what is right rather than the efficiency and profitability of the products of the development process. There is a lack of trust in the products of the capitalist system, a feeling that it cannot work fast enough or fairly enough to be able to augment the direct efforts that can be undertaken by direct transfer without receiving anything back.
Nyerere of Tanzania
Authors: Tanner Ralph 
Published: July 2007

Any understanding of this statesman’s contribution to a new African ideology of reality and humanity in their political, economic and social doctrines has to be combined with an examination of the background from which he emerged.Nyerere has been fortunate in inheriting problems which have not been as serious or restrictive of new policies as those experienced by the new presidents of Uganda and Kenya, even though there was the shared inheritance of colonialism, underdeveloped economies overwhelmingly agricultural and the shadows of a British style of administration too expensive for newly independent African states to maintain.Tanzania’s historical background is remarkably free of the problems which continue to bedevil the politics of its neighbours. Tribal differences are minimal and mostly within the Bantu group so that the state has no inherited splits in its structure. There is the national language of kiSwahili, dating from before the colonial period and structured into the administration first by the Germans and then by the British; it is a real medium of communication centred on the towns and as such has associations with politics and progress which have increased its utility.The capital at Dar-es-salaam on the coast is not dominated by one tribal group and the state had no semi-independent federated kingdoms to cope with; the progressive Haya and Chagga are too small in numbers and too far from the capital to be in any position to dominate national policies. The numerically superior Sukuma and Nyamwezi had neither the economy nor natural leaders to achieve the Kikuyu and Ganda ascendencies in their respective countries.
Coleridge: Friend or Partizan?‐I
Authors: Sharratt Bernard 
Published: July 2007

‘Unfortunately, in the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge of calumny if I add, that they have lost all credit with wise men, by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money (that is, his argument) because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and most unseemly appearance, are suffered to pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to known partizans.’ (I, 227).Coleridge’s comment on ‘those, who under the name of Reviewers, volunteer this office’, of the door-keepers of literature, seems to have passed unnoticed by many of his own reviewers. Of the reviews of The Friend I have seen, few have departed from the model drearily and anonymously exemplified in The Times Literary Supplement: a meticulous account, drawn almost entirely from Barbara Rooke’s scholarly introduction, of the immediate circumstances in which The Friend was first published and later revised; a few (very well-deserved) compliments on the superb editing, and a final paragraph asserting the profundity and continuing worth of Coleridge’s thought—and the job is done. Such a response is doubly inappropriate in this case: because on Coleridge’s own grounds the value of scholarship lies in the re-disclosure of the relevant in the dated, and because this particular work is concerned precisely with an attempt to outline underlying, ‘fixed principles in politics, morals and religion’ (title-page). To assert its continuing worth is to acknowledge both points; but—as Coleridge would agree—mere assertion is inadequate.
The Work of Brothers to All Men in Bihar, India
Authors: Thomas Jim 
Published: July 2007

During 1965-66, India suffered the worst drought in living memory the monsoon had failed for the third time in four years; food grain production fell by 19 per cent, and there was widespread famine. Mothers spent hours searching the cracked earth for grains of rice or wheat with which they could feed their children; and would walk miles to the nearest good well for a couple of buckets of water. Life was reduced to the absolute basics. Women would cut a sari into two and wear half each. When the Brothers to All Men (B.A.M.) team first drove into the village of Kosila the people tried to take the canvas from the jeep for clothing.Bihar is the most backward state of India, and the Gaya district is one of the poorest in the State. Thus B.A.M. established a team of volunteers in the town of Gaya in December, 1966. The first two volunteers began a well-digging programme in the worst-affected part of the district. This work was done in conjunction with the international Relief organization AFPRO (Action for Food Production) and was completed by April, 1967.B.A.M. started its own programme in May, 1967, employing villagers to dig emergency irrigation wells on a ‘Food for Work’ basis. For this project the National Council of Churches provided a jeep, and a supply of food grain with which to pay the villagers.
Wrestling with the Word—2
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King. It’s the last Sunday in the liturgical year: next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, when we begin to relive liturgically the whole mystery of the meaning of life as we apprehend it, once again from the beginning, with the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem.The liturgical year now ends with the feast of Christ the King, This is a feast introduced by Pope Pius XI in 1925. What he was doing then was simply to sanction and ratify a movement which started about 1870 in the town of Paray-le-Monial in France, a movement called La Société du Règne Social de Jésus-Christ, the founders of which seem mostly to have been aristocrats and merchants. The idea behind it seems to have been to suggest that the power of Christ, the sovereignty of God, was not just in our hearts, purely inward and spiritual, but that it made some visible difference to society. After all, 1870 was not a very happy time for the Church; the pope had finally lost control of the city of Rome and withdrawn into the Vatican. The new secular state had just offered him a pension and declared his basilicas and palaces extra-territorial and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the government. Pius IX refused to accept these terms and it was not until 1929 that Pius XI signed a treaty with Mussolini’s government which ran on these lines. In the climate of 1870 it must have seemed natural enough to compensate for the pope’s loss of temporal power by propagating the idea that Christ’s sovereignty is more than merely spiritual and interior— that it is also social and political.
The New English Bible
Authors: Baker Aelred 
Published: July 2007

If anyone thinks there have been quite enough translations of the Bible already, he will have to think again, and make room on his bookshelf; for the New English Bible (NEB) has arrived. It was heralded in The Times on 25th February with a fanfare, unusually shrill and orchestrated. And well it might be, for this is news indeed. It completes a project begun in 1946 and undertaken by representatives of all the major Christian bodies in Great Britain and Ireland, except the Roman Catholics. Why not they? A recent national newspaper colour supplement answers that it is because Roman Catholic scholars were engaged on the Jerusalem Bible (JB). What, all of them and all the time? Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration, but there is prudence in the telling. For seeing the august body that sat in judgment on one another’s work in committee stage, Roman Catholics could be nothing but admiring and grateful observers; which in fact, latterly, some of them officially were.Review is necessary now only of the Old Testament as the New was published separately in 1961, to explode some of the critical booby traps. The Massoretic Hebrew text has been made the basis of the translation and the finest English scholars of a generation are the instrument. The result begins boldly; for the very first words summon up the apparatus of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica and a host of modern scholars to support the reading: ‘In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth. . . .’ And in the next verse, where JB had the first of its more notable misprints, there is ‘a mighty wind’ sweeping over the surface of the waters, instead of ‘the spirit of God hovering’. Thereafter a great deal more of Hebrew scholarship, especially by English scholars, is writ forever in the text.
A Contribution to Christian Materialism
Authors: Allcock John 
Published: July 2007

The debate between Christians and Marxists has been under way now for more than a decade. Christians are admitting that they have in the past been too wrapped up in the institutional forms of religion, and that they have perhaps been seduced from the Gospel by the success of the institutional Church. Marxists, in similar vein, admit that they have in turn been too ready to castigate the outward forms of religious organization, and too little prepared to give consideration to the central message of the Gospels and the prophets. Here too the exigencies of party organization have brought about the same displacement of goals found in the Church. Each declares that the other has far more to offer than they had previously either suspected or been prepared to admit. The unhappy feature of the Christian/Marxist dialogue is that in ten years or so it does not seem to have progressed very far beyond ‘programme statements’, or declarations of intent, of this kind. The concrete and substantive advances made in debate appear to have been quite disproportionate to the expectations held of it. In particular, the development of a really coherent ‘Christian materialism’, hoped for by many participants in the debate, has not been realized.One is compelled to ask why such an initially promising line of philosophical enquiry should have provided such meagre results. Is it that we were mistaken after all in thinking that progress could be made here? Is it that Christianity and Marxism in fact have nothing to say to each other beyond that which has already been said? Are they, in the last analysis, incompatible systems of thought?
Wrestling with the Word‐3
Authors: Lascaris Andrew 
Published: July 2007

Homily for the fifteenth Sunday of the year 1970 (12th July).Readings: Amos 7, 12-15; Eph. 1, S14; Mark 6, 7-13.There are many things which one can admire in Jesus, whether one is a Christian or not. But in some things Jesus is rather primitive and does not seem to know what he is doing.I have no doubt Jesus would be turned down if he were to apply for the job of sales manager. At least, if he dared tell how he is accustomed to ‘sell’ his own message. His method seems entirely wrong.Of course one can say: ‘Jesus is not selling soap or encyclopaedias; he is bringing a religious message.’ This may well be so, but does that make any difference? A message is a message. There are lots of people who sell religious and political messages. They want to make us their allies and they do it well.To send one’s disciples away to preach without any material provisions seems rather irresponsible. Jesus’ order not to wear two tunics looks fussy. Much planning is not done, either. You just stay where you are received without even wondering whether there are not more strategic points from which to work. When people refuse to listen to you, you simply leave and do not really try to force on them the idea that they would be much happier if they listened to you.Sending our preachers in rather poor conditions may be a gimmick, but not planning carefully where you stay and for how long, and refusing to put in too much effort, suggest that Jesus' preaching methods could be improved on. His message may be interesting but he does not know how to sell it.
Scripture, Tradition and the Community
Authors: Rhymer Joseph 
Published: July 2007

This is not a time to be digging the old entrenched positions a little deeper and then defending them, so it is worth noting with caution that each of the terms in this title trails with it a long history of old battles and rigid attitudes. In any case, the old certainty about the meanings of the words we use is one of the new uncertainties.There is even an implicit assumption hidden in the order in which the terms are used traditionally. We take it for granted, perhaps, that tradition is rooted in scripture, and that the community is first formed, and then grows, by a causal combination of these two prior factors. This view holds that the people of the Old. Testament and of the New were ‘People of a Book’, who were formed by the scriptures which they accepted. They had a clear tradition, as well, handed down to them from the very beginning : ‘It was of importance that this tradition should be preserved without deformation; and fidelity to the received tradition was the ultimate assurance that the doctrine proposed was genuine.’ A little later in the same article the function of tradition as a vital factor in the formation of the community is explicitly stated: ‘… the spirit indeed taught the Church, but communicated no new word beyond that which Jesus had incarnated and uttered. The content of the revelation, once Jesus no longer dwelt on earth, was secured only by the faithful preservation and transmission of the word among his followers. Tradition must therefore be included among the constitutive elements of the primitive Christian community.’
The Bible, History and Mythology
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

I am old-fashioned enough (of course I really mean orthodox enough) to hold that every word of the Bible is true, to use a rather loose figure of speech. But I am also rational enough, I hope, and just modern enough to concede that a pretty good case can be made against the Bible being totally true, and it can be made in the name of history, and with the accusation of mythology.Each of these words has a different bearing on the truth of the Bible. History is a very respectable word, and if I say that the Bible contains history, that it gives an account of salvation history, or that Christianity is a historical religion, the reader will doubless accept the statement as true, if trite. But mythology is still rather a disreputable word, and if I say that the Bible not only contains myth but presents us with a salvation myth, and that Christianity is a mythological religion, some of my readers may be tempted to wish me burned at the stake. Yet I am prepared to say so, with qualification, and still to maintain that the Bible is totally true. In fact, I think the mythology charge against it is easier to meet than the charge of containing bad, or false, history.In any case, it is clear that a defence of its truth will involve us in a consideration of the meaning of these two words ‘history’ and ‘mythology’, not to mention the word ‘truth’, as well as requiring us to examine the facts in the shape of biblical texts. The neatest way to proceed would doubtless be, first to say what I mean by these words, and then to look at the biblical evidence in the ligfit of my clear definitions.
Anthropology and Ethics: The Thomistic Vision
Authors: Bishop Jordon 
Published: July 2007

Thomas Aquinas is generally regarded as a pillar of orthodoxy, the cornerstone of an intellectual establishment. He achieved a synthesis that almost became something of this sort, although his impact is often exaggerated. In his own time he challenged accepted tradition on a number of points and was condemned by ecclesiastical authorities.The principal point at issue in this condemnation is a doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that may sound bizarre to many today : the ‘unicity of the substantial form'. It is central to his anthropology and has serious consequences for his ethics. It was regarded by many of his contemporaries as heretical or at least dangerous. And if one were to attempt to place Aquinas in the Marxist-Leninist division of all thinkers into idealists and materialists, this doctrine would earn him a place among the materialists.I shall not attempt a textual analysis of the problem involved. This would inevitably demand a highly technical discussion in the peculiar language of thirteenth-century scholasticism. Rather, I should like to attempt a description of what I believe to have been Aquinas’s view of man and ethics in terms of our own popular picture. I believe that this view can be substantiated through serious historical research and that it is, within the limits imposed by the language gap, a faithful picture of the position of Thomas Aquinas.It is often assumed that the ethic of Thomas Aquinas is otherworldly, based on a spiritualist anthropology, and ultimately, rationalist. The first assertion is a half-truth; the second and third are false. Aquinas’s anthropology is materialistic, and he is no rationalist.
Poverty and the Religious Community
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

The first thing to be clear about when speaking of religious poverty is that we are using a metaphor, an equivocation. Religious poverty, whatever its exact form, is a certain renunciation of material goods voluntarily undertaken. On the moral level, therefore, it has only a superficial resemblance to actual poverty, the indigence of the people who are poor in the social sense. For actual poverty is not voluntary and its result is to reduce the person who suffers it to a kind of powerlessness, a slavery. The poor are by an inevitable social logic in the power of the rich. They have very little control over the course of their own lives. The poor in our industrial cities for instance are reduced to the exercise of that little bit of illusory freedom that is handed out to them by the rich in the form of choice of different brands in the supermarket, choice of programmes on TV, the unpredictability of the bingo game or the betting shop, the promise of something new in the amusement arcade where working-class housewives can be seen any day of the week trying to increase their housekeeping money playing the fruit machines. Economic poverty is one term of a relationship within society and not a mere simplicity of life. It is the foundation of other kinds of poverty: powerlessness to maintain local community in the face of council planners and property developers; educational deprivation; a ruined environment, and so on.Poverty, then, is something suffered at the hands of other people and therefore worlds apart from a condition of life freely undertaken. The poor are not masters of their own lives. The religious, however, is a master of his own life. It is a matter of free choice from the outset.
A New ‘Breviary’
Authors: Harbert Bruce 
Published: July 2007

The second Vatican Council, in its constitution on the Liturgy, initiated a reform of the Divine Office to adapt it to the needs of modern times. The amount of Office that those bound to the Breviary were obliged to recite was to be reduced, and it was stressed that the Office is intended to sanctify the whole day, so that each Hour should be recited at the time appropriate to it, Lauds and Vespers being seen as the most important Hours. The Council also emphasised that the Office is the common prayer of the whole Church, and urged secular clergy and laypeople as well as religious to come together to recite it in common.The publication in 1970 of the Liturgia Horarum, the Latin version of the revised Divine Office, was a major step towards the fulfillment of the Council’s intentions. It should not be seen as the end of the process, for liturgy as envisaged by the Council is a creative activity, demanding continual adaptation for the needs of particular groups and situations. For this reason, the Liturgia Horarum gives great scope for choice and adaptation : it is nearly always permissible to change the psalms, antiphons or readings to suit the individual or group that is celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours. This is emphasised in the fine ‘General Instruction’ with which the Liturgia Horarum is prefaced, a document that should be read by all for whom the Liturgy of the Hours forms a part of prayer. The published texts are a framework within which much variation is desirable and possible, and so a habit of reciting the Office that paid too much attention to discovering and observing precisely ‘what is laid down in the book’ would be alien to the spirit of the Council and its reformed liturgy.