bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Dominic, Father of Thomas
Authors: Horn Romuald 
Published: July 2007

At first sight St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas stand in contrast. St Dominic lived the vigorous outdoor life of an apostle, while St Thomas spent his days in the lecture rooms of university cities. St Dominic has left behind him a splendid record of achievement, while St Thomas has contributed a mountain of manuscript. They seem opposed to each other as the great ruler to the noted scholar, as the practical apostle to the contemplative, so that one might be inclined to say that these two men could never have understood one another.In fact, however, these two saints were not only of one mind but they stand towards each other in the relation of father and son.The evidence of St Thomas’s mind and character is contained in his writings, which amply cover the latter half of his life. The evidence in the case of St Dominic is more difficult to assess, but two circumstances make the task easier, for during the last twenty years of his life St Dominic was occupied with two main works, both surpassingly difficult. They were the conversion of the Albigenses, from 1203 to 1215, and the founding of his Order, from 1215 to 1221. The greatness of these tasks leaves no doubt that all the wisdom and energy of St Dominic were devoted to their accomplishment.
Aspects of French Dominican Life
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: July 2007

A Recent contributor to Orate Fratreg h&s written of Paris that there ‘at present the Dominican world seems to be in its flower’ (H;A.R., April 21, 1946), and the undoubted truth of this makes it difficult to give a whole picture of the Dominican scene, so diverse and powerful are the black and white apostles. They have rightly succeeded to Bl. Jordan and St Thomas Aquinas who first graced the Parisian Priory with their vigorous learning, culture and piety. Now however there are several Dominican centres in the same city, each with its special work.At the very end of May, 1940, Paris was a highway for refugees. Most of the shops were closed. Cars and lorries of all descriptions and sizes were moving always in a southerly or westerly direction mattresses tied to the roof and carrying every type of small household goods and furnishing. The southerly stations were jammed with refugees struggling for their trains. The Germans were only forty miles away. But at 222 Fauburg de St Honor all was peace, and Dominican life continued normally. The brethren were served with an excellent dinner in the refectory, and the brother server collected the surplus bread at the end of the meal for the poor who would be always with them, German invasion or no. At recreation they spoke of their brethren at the front, serving as ordinary soldiers. Vespers was recited with dignity and tranquillity . . . then they were apparently smothered by the German blanket.
The Perennial Philosophy
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. ‘Vivre?’ he quoted in Vulgarity in Literature, ‘nos valets le feront pour nous’. That disgust with life, and in particular with the corporeal, still seems to lie at the root of his view of reality; and to colour his approach to Reality.Some critics of The Perennial Philosophy have waxed indignant at the idea of describing as philosophy a book in which Plato and Aristotle are barely mentioned; others have taken the opposite line, and vindicated the author by viewing western philosophy as pseudophilosophy because of its exclusive reliance on discursive reasoning: if the way to knowledge of Reality is humility, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, how can we describe as philosophers, as ‘lovers of wisdom’, any but those who take this way? The truth surely lies midway between these two extremes. As some of the great Christian mystics have shown in their own lives, there are three wisdoms: the natural investigations of reason, the study of theology, the direct mystical awareness of God; and they can each be valid and valuable in their own spheres, and each help and fortify the others.
Art and the Church
Authors: Newton Eric 
Published: July 2007

Nothing that an art-critic can say about the relationship between art and the Church can have very much value. By his very nature, the art-critic is bound to tackle the problem from the wrong end. The proper person to speak with authority would be the church-critic, but since church-criticism is not a recognized occupation, and since, even if it were, I would not be competent to undertake it, I can only envisage the problem from the end nearest to me—the wrong end, I admit, but at least an end.The problem, as I see it, is this. The Church is certainly one among the various employers who recognise that the artist can be of service to them—the manufacturers who use his posters, the writers who use him as an illustrator, the personages who want him to paint their portraits and thereby preserve their memory for posterity. But, oddly enough, the Church is the most timid of them all. Poster designers and illustrators, though not usually in the front-rank of illustrative artists, at least tend to use the current idiom: they are ‘modem’ in the sense that they have learned their language from men of their own generation. But the artists employed by churchmen use, on the whole, an idiom that was developed in Italy in the 15th century, was superseded by the Baroque 17th century, forgotten by the frivolous 18th, revived, diluted and sweetened by the piously sentimental 19th and which survives into the 20th because it has been commercialised and further devitalised by firms of Church decorators.
Paul Harris
Authors: U.M.S.  
Published: July 2007

Paul Harris presents a new and very vivid approach to religious painting. He does not see the life of our Lord in the conventional way and his pictures are powerful in their originality. He has the gift of catching real light in paint and does not merely paint in lighter or darker shades. His style was greatly influenced by several years spent with the army in Iraq—many of his figures are brown ar.d move with Eastern grace.In his picture entitled Adam and Eve there is no angel with a flaming sword : Adam and Eve are driving themselves out of the paradise which their false choice has destroyed. Helplessly they stumble out of their realm, but behind them in the landscape there is no vagueness. It is clear that chaos lias broken out. Xo longer is there an underhung principle of inviolable order, and the hills and trees are frightened. A horse rears and neighs in terror. Yet Adam and Eve still hope they are only dreaming.The Holy Family is shown to us in a most delightful and unorthodox family group. Our Lady, wearing a brilliantly green frock, is hanging up washing in the garden. The child Jesus, playing at her feet, holds out a flower to her. Saint Joseph, in labourer’s clothes, just stands and watches, resting on a spade and looking very solid and protective
The Catholic Church in Austria Under Foreign Rule
Authors: Stepan Karl Maria 
Published: July 2007

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, founded by I Charles the Great, was already breaking up in 1804. A decree of Francis I, its last emperor, made its death inevitable. Its underlying principle, the unity of God and the world, the civitas Dei terrena, had lost force and efficacy. But in the Austrian empire it survived the downfall of the Dual Monarchy, and notwithstanding all it lived on through Austria’s First Republic. Not until the 13th of March 1938, when Hitler's swarms imposed the Anschluss, was this last embodiment of a great political ideal eliminated.The centuries-old unity of spiritual and secular rule had endured nowhere on the Continent of Europe so long as in Austria. Ruling and ruled alike, in the realm of State and Church respectively, saw the continued stability of this alliance as the direct, clear outcome of deliberate policy on the part of State and Church, but also as the only possible working plan for the prosperity of both realms. The throne protected the altar and the Church preached loyalty to the established government as a duty-binding Christian virtue. An acquaintance with these facts is essential if the seemingly special relationship between Church and State, the conditions inside the Church and the life of the Church in Austria are to be understood and correctly estimated.In addition, we have the outstanding fact of nineteenth century Freemasonry and its concentric onslaught on this one surviving bulwark of the ‘dark’ Middle Ages.
On Holiday in Styria
Authors: Bethell Ruth 
Published: July 2007

In Styria, or at least in a wide region around the Benedictine house of Seckau, the first week-end of August is a pilgrimage week-end to the tiny church of Maria-Schnee, in honour of the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows on August 5th, this year Bank Holiday Monday.A truck-load of sundry Graz welfare workers—Fiirsorgerinnen proper and Caritas voluntary workers and myself representing the Red Cross and C.C.R.A.—set off on the Saturday morning, made a tour of the beautiful church at Seckau, and then scattered to our various billets. Three of us were staying at a neighbouring farmhouse, the bunch of Fiirsorgerinnen were going two-thirds of the way up the mountain that night, to sleep in a hayloft and have a shorter walk to the top at daybreak. The farmhouse where we stayed was of the indescribably attractive small-holding variety, not lovely, rather poor and cramped, but satisfactory because the people were completely satisfactory. It is a one-man show, with wife and two daughters, one of them a teacher at the village school. The household is overshadowed by the loss of both sons, always a double tragedy in a peasant’s family, and news of the second death, over a year old, had only recently come through from Germany, after the reopening of postal services.There was a small lake to bathe in and a cool, musical stream running through the orchard—it provided the water supply for the household. There was a charming hospitality, piety in the old sense of the word and good, honest garden and farm produce to eat and drink in exchange for bulkier but tinned British rations.
‘Caritas’ Students
Authors: Lukesch Antony 
Published: July 2007

To all young people equally, whether students, young workers, young teachers or others, we say: Look around you, witness the hunger and the poverty, and help in whatever way you can. And to all leaders and teachers of youth we say: Take your young people seriously. Don’t suppose that you can give them as an ideal a sort of game of Red Indians or that Strong Man cult which belongs to a time which is now, thank God, passed. Do not be afraid of introducing them to hard facts, to the need that is all around us and to their duty .to help as Christians. They will understand you better than perhaps you imagine. When you can show them all this clearly, you will have done more for their lives than any amount of book learning can do.We meet weekly. We begin with Our Father and then we beg St Vincent de Paul and St Elisabeth to stand by us. Then we read a chapter from a book or a paper having direct bearing on our work: we shall doubtless have to find new ways of doing things and we need to be shown how. This summer we took passages from Dostoevsky, from the Gospel, from Novalis, from a book of eleventh century prayers, from Lives of the Saints, from Professor Geramp’s Styrian Folk Tales, from the Letters of St Justinus. In the light of what we have read we discuss our plans.
Religion and Politics in Austria
Authors: Hughes Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

A Few weeks ago I heard an Austrian historian—a thinker and a practising Catholic—describe Austria as ‘perhaps the most corrupt country in Europe’. Similar judgments are made by Englishmen in Austria on the strength of the Black Market and the power of the cigarette as a means of getting things done. But in the mouth of an Austrian it has a very different value and significance. Not only does it embody the mood of searching self-criticism which is prevalent among thinking Catholics in Austria; it also recognizes and points to a sickness in the Austrian nation far deeper-seated than the Black Market—which will, here as elsewhere, disappear only when there is a sufficiency of food and cigarettes, but which is relatively a superficial ill. Objective love and inside knowledge are the pre-requisites of a true diagnosis, and these are hard to come by for a foreigner, who may be fascinated or repelled by irrelevant details—the peasant's Grüss Gott, or the incurable unpunctuality of Austrians in keeping appointments. This article is therefore not a statement of personal opinion but a synthesis of the views of one or two Austrian Catholics, whose interpretation seems to fit the facts as they now-appear and in whom self-criticism and an earnest truth-seeking guarantee a certain degree of objectivity.That Austria was physically incapacitated by the collapse and dismemberment of the old Austrian empire is generally known, though Englishmen are apt to underrate the effects both of economic distress and of the psychological shock of becoming, suddenly, a small nation in turning the minds of Austrians towards union with Germany as a cure for their ills.
The Universe of Sir Edmund Whittaker
Authors: Thomas Ivo 
Published: July 2007

As in the lecture room, so in writing. Sir Edmund Whittaker's presentation of his material is made attractive by a certain elegance. It is apt to fill his hearers and readers with at least a temporary sense that new realms of thought have been rendered thoroughly intelligible to them. His Donellan Lectures (1946) were no exception, if we may judge by this book which holds the substance of them. But elegance is the least important quality of an enquiry so serious in its import as to be concerned with the capability of man’s reason to demonstrate that God exists. Hereafter we shall give evidence for what we can only call the scientific levity with which this grave subject is here treated. Let us first express our immense disappointment that the author should handle with such evident lack of understanding, not to say lack of knowledge of what is being talked about, matters that do not pertain to his own science. This is particularly regrettable on the part of one who is so hot against the misdemeanours of philosophers and theologians in their approach to technicalities of physics in which they may be without expert competence. He specifies, grounds of serious complaint against the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century. Today it clearly appears that there are equally serious ones on the other side.It is deplorable that the prestige of great attainments should be lent to 140 pages of misunderstanding that results in continual verbal equivocation. The ‘analogy’ here defined and depreciated is not the analogy of the metaphysician and of the Five Ways.
Liturgy and Spiritual Exegesis
Authors: Bouyer L. 
Published: July 2007

The liturgical revival, or more precisely, a renewed understanding of the liturgy, involves a biblical revival. It must be admitted that such a statement is rarely received enthusiastically. The most resolute good intentions (and it is mainly priests we have in mind, and priests who are full of zeal for souls), the most resolute good intentions, seem to falter under such a blow! ‘What?’ it will be said, ‘we must “initiate” people into the Bible? As though it were not difficult enough to “initiate” them into the liturgy alone !’ To this protest we may reply that the fact is already there. Our liturgy, the Roman liturgy, is biblical from beginning to end. Not only is it mostly composed of biblical texts (or at least biblical commentary) but even those parts which are purely ecclesiastical in composition, breathe the same atmosphere, use the same vocabulary, the same forms of thought, as the biblical texts themselves. These arguments will have little weight, however, with many of those who protest against a ‘biblical initiation’ in addition to a liturgical; and it is not difficult to see why.By ‘liturgical initiation’ they do not understand at all an initiation into the traditional liturgy, for which they have no more taste nor interest than they have for Holy Scripture. What they envisage is rather a quite new ‘concoction’, a liturgy re-made in an emancipated form, intended to ‘make contact with the masses’ by getting rid of everything in our actual liturgy which betrays its biblical or patristic origin.
Agriculture, Divinity and Wholeness
Authors: Todd Kenneth 
Published: July 2007

In an increasingly pagan world, it is a truism to say that Catholics must become more Catholic or they will have to compromise their faith to an extent which will prove fatal. The truly Catholic life must express wholeness of dedication to Jesus Christ and an integration of all activities. One aspect of the chronic lack of wholeness in living seems to me to stand out above the rest at the present time and to be of great importance. I refer to man’s dependence on the fruits and hence the well-being of the earth, which have largely ceased to interest the modem educated man except from a scientific and mechanical point of view.More than enough has already been written on the disintegration of our times, but right action can only emerge from knowledge and understanding, natural and supernatural. First, then, I am going to try and put the problem, as I see it, in its true context. In the book of Genesis we read that man was born in a garden to dress and keep it. Before he fell, man did not have to work by the sweat of his brow, but he did have to keep a garden in as good a condition as he found it. In practice he would have perhaps to keep the divisions between different kinds of plants and to maintain an orderly arrangement in the garden. For, first of all, the garden of Eden was a perfect creation, and not the finest system of husbandry in the world we know can show a garden to rival this paradise of pleasure.
Maurice Baring's Books
Authors: Lochhead Marion 
Published: July 2007

In his Round the World in Any Number of Days Maurice Baring says that ‘The most precious of all books are those which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are not aware that you are reading’. His list includes Tolstoy, Trollope, and that most lovable of writers, William De Morgan; to them we might add his own name and work. The easiest and friendliest author of our generation, and one of the most distinguished, has gone, now that he is dead; he can be matched in certain qualities, surpassed in some, but there is—there always will be—only one Maurice Baring. His peculiar charm almost eludes analysis, and analysis appears an absurdly pedantic word to use in talking of one who so deprecated pedantry; but one tries to describe his quality for the mere pleasure of writing about it.His style is like good manners, unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, but, like good manners, enjoyable and, also like good manners, part of himself, neither a pose nor an acquisition. In catholicity of taste and. culture he can hardly have been matched among the most scholarly writers of his generation; in this, indeed, he would seem to belong to a more suave and lettered age than ours. But he could never have ‘played the sedulous ape’ unless out of Puckish criticism, as in his delicious drolleries Dead Letters and Lost Diaries, which are so often exactly what the celebrities concerned ought to have said or written.
Great Tact
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

To be asked to speak in praise of St Thomas is an honour which dismays as much as it flatters; for who could claim to be master of such a subject?Yet to venture to praise St Thomas is already to claim to know him, not completely of course, but enough to recognise, in and through his work, a man distinct from all others and the work itself as an expression of reality differing in certain important respects from all others. But to know anyone is to claim a certain equality and likeness to him; as indeed we must do who dare to represent St Thomas to our generation. Representation is a kind of imitation; if we are not somehow like him inwardly how can we express his doctrine outwardly? Yet, doubtless, all of us would readily admit our inferiority to him, and would think that in this we were the more conformed to his own spirit which was so utterly unpretentious. And no doubt each of us is greatly his inferior in intelligence, let alone in holiness. But there is, I suppose, a special sense in which all of us, however gifted, are bound to be his inferiors; for we are all historically his followers, and heirs to an achievement which cannot in fact ever be supplanted. For workers in the tradition to which he made so extraordinary a contribution, St Thomas remains forever a master.
The Uprooted African
Authors: Synnott Finbar 
Published: July 2007

An African becoming a Christian in South Africa passes through a remarkable experience of two complete worlds; two religions wholly contradictory, two social systems as different, and two methods of church organisation adapted to the separate social systems. Most natives are still born in tribal circumstances, either in the Reserve Territories, Zululand, Basutoland, Swaziland and the others in which natives are under their own chiefs and ancient tribal laws; or at least they are born on European farms on the veldt, where their immediate family and social life is the tribal one, although they are not within a tribe.Let us suppose a heathen becoming a Christian, for most of our adult Christians are still first-generation Christians, and consider his experience.He is born into a wide sunlit land, an awe-inspiring creation whether it is the limitless, treeless sweeps of the veld or the great black barren ‘Dragon’ mountains. He lives in some sort of an oasis, valley or riverside or near water on the veld. He lives under a burning sun the year round, but with tremendous cold at night in winter, violent short rains and hailstorms, peril of crops and beasts. The earth is not friendly as in temperate climates. Insects are dangerous. There are snakes. It is not a land to rest on the grass, or splash in the water. But it has a stirring beauty, vastness, stillness, wonderful fruits, sudden grass and flowers after a brief rain, a light that is polished and air like wine. You may see red hills in South Africa and a green cloud; it is exotic, and the brown men who live in it love colour.
Christianity and Race
Authors: Braybrooke Neville 
Published: July 2007

Weathervanes are like historians—not always infallible: whilst often they will register a change of breeze, they will repeatedly fail to detect approaching storms. Moreover although this generalisation is true, the word ‘historian’ is used advisedly: for on the one hand, there are those who colour their deductions with their own political outlook and, on the other hand, those who examine the past with what amounts to the prophetic eye in reverse. At the moment, German history is suffering from a spate of articles, pamphlets and, in some cases, books that belong to the partisan class of writer of the first group, and on no particular body has this ill-fortune acted so much as a stigma as upon the German Catholic Church.These writers confronted with a subject such as the French Revolution seldom go beyond statistical fact: their income is largely dependent upon shoddy text-books pressed upon the young who, now considered no longer able to digest rows of figures, are treated to the same facts presented by isotype tables. That one of the principal reasons for the Revolution was because French and English philosophy had reached its acme as a science of materialism is not mentioned : still less is it hinted that the counter-blast to this materialism came from Germany.