bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Liturgy and Sociology
Authors: Timmins Antony 
Published: July 2007

It has been Mr. Dawson’s sound contention, time and again, in his various writings, that a civilization, a sociology, not founded on religion is bound to fail. His concern is ‘for the recovery of a vital contact between the spiritual life of the individual and the social and economic orgnization of modem culture.’ This concern is bom of a conviction that a culture, and hence a sociology, must have its roots firmly planted and established in theology and philosophy, otherwise the life-giving sap of religion will cease to flow. Then will the members lose their circulation, the tree will wither, and the social structure will disintegrate and decay. ‘If our civilization is to recover its vitality, or even to survive, it must cease to neglect its spiritual roots and must realize that religion is not a matter of personal sentiment which has nothing to do with the objective realities of society, but is, on the contrary, the very heart of social life and the root of every living culture. The desecularization of modem civilization is no easy matter; at first sight it may seem a hopeless task.’ But the Church has second sight; and the Church has her Liturgy.The task before us, then, is the desecularization of modem civilization; and the means are ready to hand. Our Holy Father has given the lead: ‘Mindful, then, of our condition, that we are essentially limited and absolutely dependent on the Supreme Being, before everything else let us have recourse to prayer.’ Society, and every individual member of society, is called to a renewal of baptismal vows, and to yield its members to serve justice, unto sanctification.
On Capability and Responsibility
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

By capability is meant the physical or psychological power of performing an act.By responsibility is meant the moral (as distinct from the physical) necessity of performing an act.Physical or bodily powers incapable of moral necessity are incapable of responsibility.A power that is incapable of an act may be responsible for an act, if it has (i) physical, (2) psychological, or (3) moral power over another power which is capable of the act.(1) Physical? The human will is not capable of cutting a human throat. A knife is capable of cutting a human throat. But a human will using a knife is responsible for cutting a human throat. In other words a human will has not the capability but has the responsibility of cutting or not cutting a human throat. .(2) Psychological. The feet have the capability of walking but not of hearing or of seeing. The ears have the capability of hearing but not of seeing or of walking. The eyes have the capability of seeing but not of walking or of hearing. The human will has the capability neither of walking nor hearing nor seeing.Now the feet which have the capability of walking are not responsible for walking. The ears which have the capability of hearing are not responsible for hearing. The eyes which have the capability of seeing are not responsible for seeing.But the human will which cannot walk nor hear nor see can move (or not move) the feet to walk, the ear to hear, the eye to see.Therefore the human will which has not the capability of walking, hearing seeing, has the responsibility of walking, hearing, seeing.
Three Florentines of the Renaissance
Authors: Sturzo Luigi 
Published: July 2007

Marsilio Ficino—Savonarola—MachiavelliMarsilio Ficino was the greatest of the fifteenth century Platonists. His love for Plato was at least equal to his erudition. His influence both as an individual and as head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, extended over the whole of Europe. In an early period of his life he was a humanist and a philosopher of more or less pagan tendency. In maturity of thought and years, he was deeply conscious of the Christian values that many of the learned were too ready to overlook. His ideal was the conciliation of Platonism and Christianity, pagan classicism and Christian thought, the ethics of antiquity and Catholic morals. He was fascinated by St. Augustine, but it seemed to him that the Augustinian synthesis could not appeal to the world of his time. The problems of nature, of ethics, of history were set in other terms. What he sought was to christianize Plato and to platonize the Gospel. This two-fold tendency is to be found in the Theologia platonica, in which he saw a new Summa Theologica, under the aegis of Plato instead of that of Aristotle.Three elements in the work of Marsilio Ficino render it representative of the period—the sovereignty or autonomy of philosophy as the instrument of reason, as against the criterion that made of it the handmaid of theology; secondly, a concrete realism in respect of the object of knowledge, in nature and history, as against the universalizing abstractionism of the Schools; thirdly, a natural animism, the result of the principle of Third Essences, and which formed the substructure of the astrology of the time, as against the Aristotelian conception of Forms.
Archbishop Davidson
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

Some few weeks before Archbishop Davidson died the present writer met him by his own gracious arrangement at the house of the late Lord Lovat in Bryanston Square. It was a wild rain-stormy afternoon sufficient to make younger men than the Archbishop find excuses for keeping indoors. Knowing his four score and two years, I awaited a telephone message telling me that the Archbishop dare not venture to leave home. But punctually almost to the minute of our prearranged time the old man arrived—with no complaints about the weather! His biographer was to let me into the secret of the old man’s contempt for our national weather at its worst. I was to learn that an old man’s fortitude which had instantly impressed me had been taught by a sport-loving father on the moors and hills of south-east Scotland.I could not help feeling, and perhaps manifesting, that I was in the presence of one of the most noteworthy men of the day. Again his biographer by a sober presentation of the facts was to justify my feelings. Yet the prelate who had crowned an English king and had strengthened, as few of his predecessors had strengthened, the Church of England, became at once my fellow-wayfarer into the hill-country of the soul. Many a man of less note and position than he would have felt the need of condescending to a simple friar. Their condescending would have been of the nature of humility. But there was no condescension in the man whose words and attitude were all humility, yet whose humility was not an attitude but a quality of soul.
G.K.C.—Distributist
Authors: Pepler Hilary 
Published: July 2007

“IF I had not fallen for G.K. in 1900 I should have been caught by the Webbs in 1910.” I quote this sentence from a letter recently received because it may remind many of a fate they also escaped. The Fabian, as we now know, did not offer an alternative to Capitalism, he offered fetters of security and sufficiency; a better ordered world of which, even before the war, there seemed a need. The slums were awful and the rich corrupt, we did not question the qualities of the Fabian remedy. The young were to be nourished in clinics and educated in schools, the unfit exterminated, the old fed and clothed like the lilies of the field, the dead collected by a municipal Carter Paterson. The people were to control the means of production and distribution, text books on economics were to replace the Bible and everything was to be efficient. Fabian tracts, black with statistics and documented to the nth degree, were found upon the bookstalls, experts became as eloquent as the blue books from which they preached. Sanitation was exalted into a religion and hygiene accepted among the gods. The whole was spiced, for those reaching the more active areas of propaganda, by a certain laxity in morals, an evidence of escape from Victorianism. This looseness was to be discouraged among the poor, who were to be kept sober if not righteous; though not godly they were to be maintained at least in health.The lugubrious procession of economists, welfare workers, mother Grundies and busy bodies was held up by a circus.
The Morality of Saving
Authors: Drinkwater F. H. 
Published: July 2007

“Protection of savings! ‘’ seems to be the guiding slogan of new financial regulations lately introduced in Belgium; according to the new C.S.G. Year-book. In the United States, also, the New Deal legislation in regard of banking and Stock Exchange professes to aim at “protecting the investor,” which sounds much the same thing. This is well enough as far as it goes, but a truly Catholic sociology must needs point out that there are other objectives, even more urgent, to which Governments should direct their monetary policy. If we need protection of savings, we also need protection from savings. It is right that people who save money should be protected from their own over-eager avarice and from the financial sharks who take advantage of it; and it is equally necessary that the community in general should be protected from accumulations of money, large or small, which are used in ways injurious to the common good.Nineteenth century philosophy took for granted that thrift and saving was always a good and meritorious habit. Nowadays we are not so sure. We can see that this business of saving is at the bottom of the whole money muddle. If there had been no savings there would have been no banks to look after them, no lending of them at interest, no invention of credit-creation, no national debts. The old Christian and Catholic teaching, of course, condemned saving (in effect) as sinful. Everybody was supposed to give away his surplus income to those who hadn’t enough; money saved was money that ought to have been spent on the poor.
The Perversion of Economic History
Authors: Lamb Richard 
Published: July 2007

In 1829 William Cobbett published the History of the Protestant Reformation. Cobbett was a remarkable controversialist, and his views were always highly coloured, but in this work he disclosed one of the most significant truths of English economic history. He pointed out to an incredulous nation that the social conditions of the English peasantry had seriously and progressively deteriorated since the beginning of the sixteenth century. He attributed this phenomenon to the dissolution of the religious houses at the time of the Reformation, and to the alienation of property which formerly was held for the relief of poverty, and which now passed into selfish and unscrupulous hands.
The pioneer of modern critical economic history was Thorold Rogers. Without acknowledgment and without intention his detailed and laborious researches substantiate Cobbett’s assertions. Thorold Rogers considered that the impoverishment and progressive deterioration of the peasantry between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was due to a concerted effort on the part of landlords to lower wages in order that each estate’s rent roll might be increased as much as possible. In many instances in his works Thorold Rogers made assertions and generalizations which could not be justified. It appears that later historians have used these errors as a ground for denying the main truth that lies in Thorold Rogers’ theory of social development, and lately Catholic writers have been emphasizing that the accepted economic histories of to-day ignore the established thesis that the condition of the peasantry between 1500 and 1850 was consistently made worse by the individualistic attitude of the landowning class.
Communist Self-Witness About Spain
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

(a) The brief account of events in Spain since 1931, given on earlier pages, shows the vivid contrast between the weakness of the Republican-Socialist Government of 1931-1933 and the strength of the Republican Government of 1936.
(b) It would be incredible blindness for anyone in the working class or on the side of democracy and liberty, not to see what made this change possible.
(c) It was the developing strength of the working class as a whole; and this, in turn, was made possible by the developing strength of the Communist Party, and the triumph of its policy of unity and resolute class-struggle.
(d) As in other countries, the leadership of the Socialist Party was hostile to the Communist Party, hostile to a policy of class-struggle, filled with illusions of a peaceful, democratic constitutionalism.
(e) This led to the policy of holding back and even repressing the militant struggle of the rank and file in 1933.
(Spain, by Emile Bums, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, page 11.)
The italics are those of the pamphlet. I am writing this not as a politician, nor in the interest of politics, but solely in the interests of the poor and of peace.
1. I need not point out that this honest self-witness of the Communist Party dispenses us from the almost impossible task of finding out the truth about the alleged terrorism on one side or the other. For the moment the only available evidence is of one side about the other; in other words, it is admittedly the weakest of all evidence.
Definition of Psychology
Authors: Elrington Aidan 
Published: July 2007

To say of psychology that it is the science of the soul, whilst this is in accordance with the literal meaning of the word, is not to take us very far. We need to know at the outset something of what the soul is in itself and how its investigation may best be undertaken. In truth an account of the definition of psychology is to a large extent an epitome of its history. The conflict of opinion already alluded to in our previous articles is by no means a contemporary development, as some of our readers may have been led to suppose, though it has undoubtedly assumed, in some respects, a new form. It is our purpose here, therefore, to trace to their sources in a summary manner these conflicting ideas as to the nature and scope of psychology.
The main issues turn in the first place upon the origin and meaning of the word “soul” and the relation of that which is so called to the body, as well as upon the standpoint from which the study of soul has proceeded. It will be remarked, secondly, however, that a new standpoint was adopted round about the seventeenth century when the earlier accepted notion of soul came to be replaced by that of mind and consciousness, which thus became the primary concern of the psychologist. In a very general way, the earlier standpoint may be described as “objective,” the later as “subjective.” A third phase came to pass when psychology began to be defined as the science of immediate or individual experience; the word “psyche” or soul being used for the totality of individual human experience.
Our Aim of Truth
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

“The true speaking absolutely is prior to the good, as appears from two reasons. First because the true is more closely related to being, which is prior to good. . . Secondly . . . knowledge naturally precedes appetite.” (Summa, 1a, q. 16, art. 4, English trans.)The object of the intellect (i.e. Truth) “is more simple and more absolute than the object of the will” (i.e. goodness). Therefore the intellect in itself and absolutely is higher and nobler than the will—yet “the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is better than the will.” (Ibid., q. 82, part 3.)These two texts from the Summa of the Blackfriar St. Thomas Aquinas must outline the attitude of Blackfriars towards Truth.At the risk of failing to express what is in our mind, let us say that we fully accept the consequences of St. Thomas’s principle: “Truth is more simple and absolute than goodness, therefore the intellect is higher and nobler than the will.” In our aim of finding and telling the truth we will not primarily concern ourselves with what is good; or only with that highest good, the Truth. This is but to realize that transcendentals, such as truth, must be sought for their own sake or they will not be found in their fullness. Truth-seeking and truth-telling must not be blended and weakened with enquiries into the economic, political, ethical or theological value of the truth.
Worship
Authors: Tindal-Atkinson Aelwin 
Published: July 2007

“We went on up the narrow strait, thus anxiously. On this side lay Scylla . . . on that Charybdis.” In the Odyssey of every Christian there are times and places when the words of Homer strike home. Worship and personal prayer are essential to him as motive forces directing his journey “up the narrow strait”; and in his living experience both are beset by the two monsters that lie within bow-shot of his anxious passage, routine and pietism. The one springs from misapprehending the rôle of corporate worship, the other from over-absorption in individual devotion. As there is little steerage way there must always be sufficient impetus to keep the frail craft moving straight ahead, responsive to every touch of the helmsman. Individual temperament will give an inclination to one side or the other: the scrupulous towards self-absorption and the easy-going to mechanical routine.The same difficulty holds good in some degree for group worship with its tendency to divagate towards high-and-dry formalism or towards an unstable revivalism. Each extreme marks the over-emphasis of one of the two essential coordinates of worship, a disciplined cultus and personal responsiveness. In the history of the Church the scales have moved successively up and down without irrevocably destroying the careful balance, though the individualist side has tended to be outweighed, since corporate devotion has a constant bias towards formalism, and the movements back have been sudden and violent in character.
Church and State in Europe
Authors: Quinn Edward 
Published: July 2007

By his study of the contemporary relations between Church and State on the continent of Europe Dr. Adolf Keller has deserved well not only of his co-religionists but of all those who are vitally interested in the present phase of the perennial struggle between Christianity and the powers of this world. Naturally, his view of the solution of these problems does not coincide with the Catholic view, but it certainly shows a realization of the need for greater unity, on which Catholics insist, and his analysis of the actual situation and presentation of the facts are of the greatest value to those of our Faith who are endeavouring to understand the situation and contribute towards its improvement. It is therefore the object of the present article to make a rapid survey of the problem in the light mainly of Dr. Keller’s evidence and to give some indication of the probable outcome of contemporary events in this sphere.The constitution of the Church is divine and remains fixed and permanent, that of the State is human and based on contingent needs which vary from age to age. It follows that the relation between Church and State will not change through any development of the former but only through the different attitude which the State takes up with regard to the Church’s claims. In the light of her long experience and aided by the guidance of the Holy Ghost, the Church will adopt different methods according to the changing needs of time and place in order to fulfil her age-old task of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth and to bring supernatural life to the members of States which fail to recognize a law higher than the natural and often even offend against the latter.
Psychology and Free-Will
Authors: Elrington Aidan 
Published: July 2007

In the course of a long and interesting correspondence between William James and Shadworth H. Hodgson on the subject of free-will, the latter writes as follows: “Let us, as you say, have no more ‘gnashing of the teeth over the freewill business’; let us agree to differ. The best of it is that we both believe in the reality of free-will, only that I think it can be reconciled with determinism, while you think indeterminism is required to make it conceivable.”Although some fifty years have passed since these words were written discussion concerning the freedom of the will and determinism continues varied only in its mode of presentation. The same difficulties which confronted the writers just mentioned confront the psychologist of to-day. These difficulties arise in fact from differences of opinion concerning the meaning of free-will on the one hand and determinism on the other. At bottom the problems involved are speculative rather than empiric, and the controversy to which we have alluded was conducted rather on the former than on the latter plane.
Thoughts on An Encyclical
Authors: White Victor 
Published: July 2007

“Pope Denounces Communism” screamed the headlines. And of course there were the usual impertinent attempts to exploit the fact in class-interests. But the text of Divini Redemptoris proved a dangerous weapon for those concerned to preserve the social-economic status quo and to hinder the logical development of the existing industrialcapitalist society into a socialistic one. As said La Libre Belgique:If atheistic communism is condemned, so too are all those evil “Christians” who live on the miseries of others, the selfish or blind “conservatives” who have failed to foresee that the indignation of the proletariat would impel them to rebellion, the evil rich who have so long been the object of the Saviour’s curses. . . . The vigour of the Pope’s words to them has astounded and disconcerted the more timid. But there are very few who have understood the love that lies hidden in that anger. This Encyclical is a model of righteous indignation at the service of charity, truly befitting a Father who longs for the salvation of his children.
The Hymns They Deserve
Authors: Tindal-Atkinson Aelwin 
Published: July 2007

Hymns have been written by the thousand, and of the thousands written very few have stood the test of time, the vicissitudes of religious revolution, or the vagaries of human taste. Few of us can regret the disappearance of many hymns that would evoke upon discovery no response in our minds beyond a polite curiosity and mild amusement that we reserve for the more grotesque museum pieces. Modem hymns, however, may meet with a different reception, and the man who would open a public discussion about them must step out along a thorny path, where even his guardian angel may fear to tread. Some hymns which the stream of time has borne down to us may still be sung with pleasure, “rari nantes in gurgite vasto.” And their appeal need not rest solely upon their antiquity, but may possible be based upon their adequate expression of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.We may like hymns or we may dislike them, whether on principle or from prejudice: we may sing them one and all with a joyous abandon, indifferent alike to their quality or their quantity: we may accept them with a Christian resignation as part of that bracing discipline, which makes a man upon other occasions take medicine with a nauseous taste hoping that thereby he may possibly reap some benefit. Whatever we may think or feel about them, hymns are here and we cannot avoid them: a careless turn of the knob on the Radio will bring us the most unexpected examples: on Sunday the very streets are not free of them, when every town has its contingent of the Salvation Army: even attendance at a Cup Final may involve us willy-nilly in a mass of rough men sobbing in chorus, “Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide! “