bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Gospel and the Church
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

It has been widely acknowledged that Dr Hans Kiing’s The Council and Reunion (fluently translated by Cecily Hastings in a Sheed and Ward Stagbook) is one of the most important of the vast flood of publications released by Pope John XXIII’s announcement of his intention to summon an ecumenical council. So far, however, this acknowledgment has not been accompanied by any serious examination of the book, at least by Catholic reviewers in England. Its reception has been generally favourable, even rapturous (see The Clergy Review, January 1962, p. 33); but there seems to have been a marked disinclination to enter into detailed discussion. What is particularly unfortunate about this is that the book has become to some extent the manifesto of a party; there is sufficient evidence, though not in print, so far as I know, that a resolute opposition to the book among certain Catholics has been able to take shape in silence. It seems to me that silent opposition and vocal enthusiasm form a particularly vicious combination; and surely the best way of releasing what tension there is is to look at Rung’s book critically.Criticism ordinarily implies detachment; yet it might be claimed that here if anywhere detachment is out of place. What could demand a more passionate commitment than the reform of the Church? The critical detachment which we shall try to practise here, then, is not a detachment from the profound reforming purpose of Kiing’s book or indeed of the Council itself; but it will be a serious attempt to find a standpoint which is neither simply ‘conservative’ nor simply ‘progressive’, nor for that matter simply ‘middle of the road’.
Holy Land Divided
Authors: Boase Alice 
Published: July 2007

To visit the Holy Land must be the dearest ambition of every Christian. To live in it as I have done for more than five years is a rare and wonderful privilege.Even so my picture of the Holy Land is incomplete, for it has been tragically divided since the Jewish-Arab war of 1948 led to its partition between Israel and Jordan. The two countries are still at enmity, so the cleavage is absolute. Even the Holy City is rent in two, for the western suburbs have been developed to form Israel’s capital, while the eastern region, including the Old City, belongs to Jordan.At an ordinary level there is no communication at all between the two countries, or even between the two halves of Jerusalem. Only diplomats and United Nations officials may move between the two with relative freedom, and by a special arrangement, tourists are allowed to pass—but not re-pass—from one to the other. For those like myself—and I am an Irish woman living in Jordan by reason of my husband’s employment—there are no such concessions. Never once in the years I have lived in Jerusalem have I set foot on the soil of Israel which lies only a few hundred yards west of our house.To begin with I found this situation frustrating in the extreme, for from our windows we can clearly see people and cars moving about in the other Jerusalem which is so near—and yet so very far away. Gradually I have become resigned to the knowledge that I am never likely to see Galilee or Nazareth, which together with a great many places of purely historical interest, are ‘on the other side’.
Freedom from Hunger
Authors: McCormack Arthur 
Published: July 2007

The ‘Freedom from Hunger’ campaign has focussed the attention of the more favoured countries on the glaring inequalities that exist in the world today between nations. There is much talk of ‘one world’, and with the immense speeding up of communications, physically speaking, this concept is now real. But the world is divided into two camps as clearly as when Disraeli wrote about the ‘two nations’ in Victorian England. On the one hand, there are the ‘provided for’, those who enjoy this world’s goods and live in plenty and luxury; and on the other hand, the ‘have-nots’ who stagnate in want and are familiar only with the fear of hunger, sickness and death. Far from being filled up, the gap between these two groups is growing wider, for prosperity breeds prosperity, and want engenders want.The amount of actual hunger and under-nourishment in the world is difficult to calculate, for under-developed countries have underdeveloped statistics. And scientists differ about what actually constitutes under-feeding in terms of calories and so on. This has led at times to exaggeration. It does not seem at all true, as is sometimes claimed, that two out of three people in the world go to bed hungry. The best evidence, produced by Dr P. V. Sukhatme of FAO in May 1961, estimates the proportion as between ten and fifteen per cent, that is to say between 300 million and 450 million of the inhabitants of the world. Malnutrition is also a scourge of the less developed countries and leads to diseases such as kwashiorkor, pellagra, beriberi, etc. The same report puts the number of those suffering from under-nutrition and malnutrition as fifty per cent of the world’s inhabitants.
Uprootedness and Alienation in Simone Weil
Authors: Vetö Miklós 
Published: July 2007

Simone Weil was still a school-girl when she discovered Marx, and in a way through Marx the crisis-stricken Europe of the late twenties and the early thirties. While deeply influenced by Marx in her earlier writings, his doctrine was never a revelation or a religion for her. Her syndicalist experience showed her the inability of orthodox marxism to cope with twentieth century problems. Her enormous knowledge of the history of philosophy prevented her from being satisfied by a relatively poor and fragmentary philosophical system. Her moral and metaphysical aspirations were not met by Marx’s answers to eternal human problems. She threw off his influence quickly, long before her religious experiences. She still retained a strong interest in several marxist problems and especially in that of ‘estranged labour’. Her early writings describe and question. The works of her maturity answer. No one else has created so rich a synthesis of the problems which might have been raised while attempting to analyse labour. Although Plato and Marx are the most important contributors to this synthesis, its answers are of purely Christian inspiration.One may say without hesitation that the most original, if not the only original, idea of Marx in the field of philosophy proper was that of the alienation of labour. The whole pathetic richness of his early writings culminates in his description of ‘estranged labour’. How the worker is alienated from the product of the work which will be not his own. How he is alienated from his work since it does not serve him, and how he comes to hate it as causing pain and suffering. The worker is no more the subject but the object of the work.
Augustinus Semper Vivus
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

In his recent novel Island Mr Aldous Huxley says some very silly things about St Augustine, or to be quite fair he makes one of his ‘wiser’ characters say them. From them it can be deduced that all he actually knows about Augustine is the Confessions, or a vague impression about that work, massa damnata, and unbaptized infants. This is probably representative of what the average educated man knows about Augustine, and so he will readily accept Mr Huxley’s dismissal of the man as a neurotic rigorist predestinationist. But the average educated Englishman cannot be excused this absurd misconception much longer, for what is in fact a monumental biography of St Augustine, Augustine the Bishop by Professor F. Van der Meer, is now available in English. Describing Augustine’s death the author says this about him: ‘To his Church he bequeathed two things; the memory of his humble and indescribably lovable personality [so much for the neurotic pessimist], and his great library, the archive of his spirit’ (p. 274).It is quite clear that Dr Van der Meer knows that library inside out, and that he has read every word of Augustine’s letters and sermons, which are the most self-revealing of his works. And so in an immensely readable 589 pages (excluding notes) he substantiates over and over again the humble and indescribably lovable personality of his hero. I feel bound to say that it seems a pity that the publishers have presented his work in a volume that is handsome indeed, and well printed, but whose weight (3 lb.) and price (£4 10s) can scarcely fail to deter many possible purchasers and readers. The book is really a classic. It has had to wait almost twenty years for translation into English - understandably, perhaps.
Background to Home‐Making
Authors: Deeds D. M. 
Published: July 2007

The most important factors in any home are the people in it and the relationships between them. This paper is, however, mainly concerned to discuss other aspects of home making because it was originally delivered at a conference at which the strains and stresses of human relationships within a family were covered by other papers.Let us look first and very briefly at the economic factor. How do we reconcile the contradictory views of our society which are from time to time presented to us, an affluent society on the one hand, slums and poverty stricken homes, on the other.Some recent figures of average earnings published by the Ministry of Labour are significant. These include overtime, nightwork and bonuses; they cover both skilled and unskilled workers in industry, mining and quarrying and transport, but do not include employees of the National Coal Board and the National Dock Labour Board for whom separate statistics are given. The figures are based on returns made during one pay week published in February 1961. The heaviest concentration of earners lay between £12 and £14 and more than half earned between £9 and £15. Average earnings in these industries as published last February were £14. 17s. for manual workers and £14.19s. for weekly paid clerical and administrative staff. A very few (0.42 per cent) earned less than £7 and about 5 per cent earned less than £9, all these figures refer to what is described as full time adult work. Skilled craftsmen could well earn a good deal more than the average, but the unskilled man might earn a good deal less.
Afghanistan
Authors: Avery P. W. 
Published: July 2007

A first visit to the quarter of a million odd, landlocked square miles of Afghanistan should act on any but a finished, finite clod rather in the same way as Samuel Johnson’s tour of the Hebrides did on him. The analogy is not entirely inapposite for, like the Hebrides, Afghanistan is a land of rock; and where one is lashed by the cleansing sea, the other is bathed in the cleansing light of brilliant sunshine out of clear skies, so that both (and one has St Patrick’s Breastplate in mind) may be considered similarly to uplift the susceptible spirit.Afghanistan’s rocks, however, are threaded through the valleys down which, in sharp contrast to mauve and grey stone and biscuit-coloured sand, stretch strips of green (from the air, black) cultivation, the fields of corn and millet turning yellow, lush vineyards, apple trees and screens of poplar and willow, the more lacey and delicate for the harsh contrast of the major portions of a country clustered round the southwestern spurs of the majestic Hindu Kush.What a formidable thing and an evocative word the Hindu Kush is! No wonder the Afghan people, ethnographically varied though they be, are all brave and bright eyed, tending to tallness and litheness of limb—men capable of leaping from rock to rock with the long muskets of independence in a land where everyone is his own Khan. Here might be recalled the answer to a question. In a garden of the Kabul Valley, a garden of gaily coloured flowers, high in the hills with a stream rushing down over the rocks, when some peasants appeared an Afghan host was asked: ‘Do they belong here?’—meaning ‘Are they the men who look after this garden?’ The reply was: ‘No. “Here” belongs to them’.
Catholicism in America
Authors: Cameron J. M. 
Published: July 2007

My opportunities for studying Catholicism in the United States were fragmentary, in the course of a year devoted to university teaching and travel. I had the good fortune to be teaching at what is generally taken to be the best of the Catholic universities, Notre Dame, Indiana; and it was in the main from this particular listening post that I picked up my information and my views. I did travel a good deal in the Middle West and the Far West and this gave me an opportunity to see in passing some aspects of Catholic life. As well, I went to non-Catholic universities and was able to see both the reactions of non-Catholic Americans to Catholicism and the work of Catholics in non-Catholic universities, particularly through the Newman centres. I was also a steady and, in some instances, horrified reader of the Catholic press.What I want to do is to examine American Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon. I do not think that anything I have to say is directly relevant to the problems of Catholic higher education in this country, except in so far as comparisons are always likely to turn out to be instructive. American society and its problems are so remote in many if not all respects from the problems of any European society that it is hard to see at first that American Catholic higher education offers either models for us to imitate or examples of what we should avoid.Perhaps I ought to make it plain at the start that I conceived an enormous affection and respect for the society of the United States. It is possible that it will in fifty or a hundred years produce one of the great civilizations of the world. My critical comments, and there will be many in the remarks that follow, are those of an admirer. Perhaps I might even, before I begin my analysis, try to explain what it was about American society that fascinated me and filled me with affection and, it is not too much to say, a certain intoxication.
Six Pillars of Wisdom
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

Professor A. W. Lawrence has complained that the Speigel-Lean film which has his brother for its hero is false to the spirit, and certainly to the text, of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It has to be admitted that Mr Robert Bolt’s admirable script has little in it of the Doughty-and-Authorized-Version grandeurs, and inevitably some foreshortening of the epic was necessary to make the film at all. As it is, you are imprisoned for four hours, and, however voluntary a captive you may be, enough in this context must mean a good deal less than a detailed recapitulation of the book.The narrative is simple, confined almost entirely to the desert campaigns that led to the capture of Aqaba and the entry into Damascus. There is mercifully little attempt to use Lawrence as the peg for an interpretation of abnormal psychology. His illegitimacy is referred to (by himself), and the humiliation of his treatment at Deraa is indicated (though with much less sadistic detail than the book itself supplies). In effect we are shown a resolute, romantic Englishman who has a deep love and understanding of the Arabs and who is convinced that he can win them unity in their common revolt against the Turks. The film is an account of how this happened, and how in the end Lawrence’s hopes were betrayed by the politicians and by the Arabs’ failure to preserve into peace the resolve they had known in battle.In a curious way we know little more about Lawrence in the end than we did in the beginning. Peter O’Toole’s much praised performance preserves an odd reticence, not only of word and gesture (which the character of Lawrence requires) but of understanding.
Reunion or Conversion
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

In recent months there has been controversy in the Catholic press casting doubt on the expediency of the ‘reunion’ or ecumenical work taking place within the Church, and promoted by the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians at the Vatican Council. It is said to be drying up the normal inflow of conversions, because some potential converts are encouraged to stay where they are in order to work for eventual unity between the Church and their own dissident communion. It has been asserted, though the authority for this does not appear widely based, that in Germany, for this reason, there is a calculated refusal on the part of some priests to accept prospective converts for instruction and reception. Whatever the truth may be in this matter the question is certainly being asked by a number of priests and lay people in this country whether this new apostolate is not encouraging a kind of indifferentism, in the minds of Catholics, concerning the uniqueness of the one true Church as the way of salvation for all men and so hindering individual conversions.The question came up for discussion at the Heythrop Conference and, as far as I know, the general conclusion reached was that the work of attracting, instructing and receiving individual converts, and the work of mutual penetration and understanding between ourselves and other Christians, which is the aim of ecumenical encounter, are specifically different from each other in technique and approach, but in the long run compatible because they are complementary. Catholic ecumenism is a preparation of the ground, on a wide and corporate scale, for a conversion to truth, which will ultimately lead by God’s grace to unity in faith.
Catholic Historians and the Reformation—I
Authors: McGrath Patrick 
Published: July 2007

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.
The Conscience of the Contemporary Cinema
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

The major moral problems to be tackled on film - seriously tackled, not exploited for commercial or publicity expedience - are, as might be expected, problems that affront the social conscience rather than the religious. And to those who frivolously take this to be a reflection on the immorality of the cinema, it might be useful to consider whether it is not rather a reflection on the lack of real charity among the conventionally religious. These major moral problems can be, I think, most easily explored under a few broad headings, though these are necessarily fluid and some films could as easily fit under any of three and some, perhaps, fit uneasily under any. I would suggest then, that it is convenient to survey them under the headings of war, justice, society and the individual, and what one might almost call ‘conscience and religion’ or perhaps more accurately ‘conscience and God’. There is even, I think, a faint embryonic shaping of a category which might almost be called ‘conscience and sex’, though most of the films I myself would put here could probably be just as well placed under the category of the ‘individual’, because the situation explored is nearly always conveyed in terms of limited personal relationships rather than in wider implications of the moral law as it is understood by classical theologians.War. The theme of war in the cinema is, roughly speaking, treated in two quite different ways and it is important to realize this because it is, after all, one of the most constantly recurrent themes in the film output of nearly every nation that played an active part in the last war.
The Religion of the Early Humanists
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

To start with, a tempting text for the anti-humanist; only let him take care how he reads it. In 1485-6 a Flemish Carmelite wrote to the Venetian scholar Ermolao Barbaro to compliment him on his work and ask some personal questions: is Barbaro married? Or is he a priest or a religious? Answer: I am neither this nor that nor the other: paganus et spontis meae sum. Duos agnosco dominos, Christum et litteras; cetero sum liberrimus . . . Obviously, the context saves us from misreading that paganus; Barbaro is using classical Latin and the word here means simply ‘layman’. And yet an unsympathetic reader might cavil still. That acknowledgement of two lords, Christ and . . . ‘letters’! Did not our Lord tell us we cannot serve two masters? Certainly; all the same it might be unfair to jump to conclusions: better, for the moment, to keep Barbaro’s phrase in mind as a kind of motto of the humanist mentality we shall be considering, epitomizing both the integration it aspired to and also, no doubt, the risks that it ran.The literary sense of ‘humanist’ - as referring to ‘one devoted to or versed in the hterary culture called the humanities; a classical scholar, especially a latinist’ (O.E.D.) - is almost obsolete in modem English, except in history books, where Humanism designates the revival of classical studies in the later Middle Ages and the currents of thought and feeling that it occasioned. A discreet definition on these lines is offered by the American scholar E. H. Wilkins: ‘the scholarly strand in the Renaissance’; which in turn raises of course the question of what we mean by the Renaissance. As an historical term it obviously contrasts with ‘Middle Ages’; there was, it is implied, a rebirth bringing those Ages to an end; and they, as ‘middle’, intervened between a time when something was alive and a second time when it came back to life; and so were a more or less dead or dormant epoch, an interval of darkness between two luminous eras.