bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Economics and Social Progress
Authors: MacLaren Drostan 
Published: July 2007

Though the nature, characteristics and consequences of the economic system we call ‘capitalism’ are so well known as to be taken for granted, yet when we try to frame a definition of the system it is not at all easy. There exists a multitude of definitions of capitalism: the fact that many of these are incomplete or else falsified by subjective interpretations adds to the general confusion.To begin with, we can say that capitalism is a system; that is to say, it is the realisation in the factual order of an economic doctrine. There is a considerable amount of evidence, both in theory and practice, in support of the position which maintains that the economic doctrine enshrined in capitalism has two essential characteristics. It is based upon private ownership of the means of production and of the goods produced: its raison d’etre, its end or objective, is profit.This second element—the accumulation of money for its own sake as the sole objective—immediately puts capitalism in conflict with Christian moral teaching. Attempts have been made to explain away this opposition by attributing it to moral failings in individuals by saying it is the capitalist spirit and not capitalism itself which is bad. There will always be individuals who sin against God and against their neighbour by the sin of avarice: these individuals flourish in any economic regime: capitalism is good in itself and must not be blamed for their existence. Such an attitude is completely shattered by Horvath in his famous book on property.
Private Property and the Distributist Thesis
Authors: Jebb Reginald 
Published: July 2007

The central tenet of the distributist thesis is a wide-spread diffusion of private ownership, and perhaps our first task should be to show that property privately owned accords with the precepts of natural law. Possession of material things is a right of man, because, being created with reason and will, he is to that extent master of the material world, and the natural destiny of the latter is to serve his needs. But possession does not necessarily imply private ownership. There are, for example, communal forms of ownership. The right of individuals to possess private property is not therefore an absolute precept of natural law. But both reason and experience prove that communal ownership, as a general mode of human possession, is unsatisfactory. Aristotle calls it an occasion of strife, and it is almost inconceivable that, with human beings as they are, such a system generally applied could fail to cause constant quarrelling, interfere grievously with primary production, and weaken the bonds that unite the family.Private ownership, provided it be equitably distributed and does not claim excessive powers, has none of these defects. Moreover the whole trend of the Church’s teaching, especially in the famous encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as in several allocutions of the present Pope, has been in its favour.But from the starting point of wide-spread private property Distributism enters a field that comprises politics, economy, and human relationships. In this era of finance-industrialism it is revolutionary in its aims. It is in open and unique opposition to the prevalent trends of modern life.
Capitalism in Canada
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

On 4th February of this year a remarkable joint pastoral letter was published in Quebec, signed by all the bishops of the Province of Quebec, with the title The Workers’ Problem in the light ofthe Social Teaching of the Church. Second only to the United States, Canada has prospered from the application of liberal capitalism to an expanding economy. The encylical is the more remarkable in that in some respects it is an indictment of liberal capitalism. As such it was interpreted and has provoked a number of reactions from big business. It has been understood as support for the stand taken by Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal and Bishop Desranleau of Sherbrooke in the ‘asbestos strike’ of last year. Moreover it foreshadows a period of increasing strife between the Church in the Province of Quebec and the forces of capitalism which are allied with a corrupt though soidisant Christian government.At the outset the bishops state quite bluntly that, though their country has been endowed by Providence with greater wealth than most parts of the world, there are many areas and professions where the pay is insufficient. In fact, the national wealth is far from equitably distributed and the economic system does not provide ‘for all the members of society in a stable way the material conditions that they need for their spiritual and cultural development’. This latter was declared by Pope Pius XII in 1948 to be me purpose of an economic system. Further than that, the fundamental problem of the worker in Canada has not been solved: economic and social security for himself and for his family.
Making Capital in Communist China
Authors: Braybrooke Neville 
Published: July 2007

For the best part of this century, the exploitation of the East by the West has been a favourite theme with pamphleteers; and as the sincerity of the pamphleteers has grown, so has the interest of the public declined. The subject, it is argued, has been flogged to death and, taking an Epicurean stand, Englishmen have added—let sleeping dogs lie. In the common mind China appears a far distant continent—another world.The attitude is typical of Englishmen as a whole, but it is also typical of many Europeans. In America the orientation is different, because Chinese emigrés make up a considerable part of the population of the United States. Often enough Hollywood may depict the Chinaman as either a pirate or opium eater, but to the American he is a person of distinct characteristics; he may run a successful chop-suey restaurant in Greenwich Village or he may be an astute lawyer. They are not deluded by the romantic notion of film directors that he is a man capable of saying little else other than ‘Me muchee-muchee sad’. They are well aware that he may as yet prove a powerful business rival, although his methods of business will not necessarily be those of the American businessman. For part of Congress’s dilemma over recognising the ‘People’s Republic of China’ is a fear of admitting to a certain national failure. The Americans, despite their vast propaganda machine, have failed to impress the Chinese with their way of life; the Chinese have remained impervious, philosophically isolationist.
Ortega and Religion
Authors: Sarmiento Edward 
Published: July 2007

Ortega as a philosopher has met with opposition from some Catholic circles within the Spanish-speaking world because he not only has apparently forsaken his own Catholic tradition but has ignored religion in his own philosophical scheme. If at most he can be said to have left a place for it, the place is so far unoccupied. It is true that very early in his career Ortega gave up the practice of religion and that at no time has religion in any pietistic way interested him as a topic. It is also true that he has always treated it with respect and he includes the religious sense as one of the five elements in his theory of values. (The others are goodness, beauty, truth and justice.)This neglect, however, is only superficial and accidental. Ortega’s thought is really profoundly religious and one is inclined to classify him as possessing the truly religious temperament of the artist as against the intellectual or mystic. Indeed, one of the difficulties about Ortega’s philosophy all through is that it is a very subtle system of thought, closely articulated, but mediated through a highly aesthetic temperament. Ortega’s philosophical aim is so fundamental that it is unlikely that he himself will ever arrive at the point of sketching the natural theology proper to it. His object is to change radically the whole approach to knowledge and being by starting from the individual experience of living and, instead of projecting concepts upon, as it were, the screen of the intellect, work to truth within that experience.
Simone Weil, God's Servant
Authors: Nicholl Donald 
Published: July 2007

There were giants in those days’. It was in reference to the I past generation of Catholic writers that the remark was made, to the generation of Chesterton, Gill, Belloc and Baring, all those whose brilliance and wit led to talk of a Catholic revival in fashionable circles. How many of them were really giants might be questioned; but it is beyond question that a lesser breed followed in their wake, whose clever caperings and ‘told-you-so’ attitude did little credit to anyone, least of all to the ‘giants’ and the cause they served. Nor has the cause been better served by that superficial reading of the ‘giants’ which induced ill-founded reveries of an ‘age of faith’ and readily identified Christianity with dead cultures.And the most poisonous effect of this fashionable nostalgia has been to leave a whole generation of young people thinking of themselves as inhabiting a world of winter which they can only hope will somehow turn again into a medieval summer. It will not. For despite the gloomy predictions and pessimistic determinism of the swelling band of prophet-historians, this wintry world is the one we have to live in, and, under God, it is we who must alter it. Furthermore, if only we were not so blind, if only we would take our eyes away from the past and look at the world in which we are living, we should see the summer, here already, shining in countless heroic lives. There are giants in these days. It is true, they are not given to poetry and belles-lettres, these giants of our day; they are a silent race, as becomes those who remember Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Where are they to be found? Many of them in monasteries, returning to God his choicest gifts, even the gift of speech; some live in Eastern Europe; others, perhaps, sell Catholic papers outside Lyons Corner House on dreary Saturday nights.
Travelling to Some Purpose
Authors: Walker Peregrine 
Published: July 2007

When you close the door behind you and start on a journey, something important begins to happen. You are making an act of faith in mankind. And if that seems too pompous a description, then at least let it be conceded that any journey is a trip to the unknown. The elaborately equipped explorer, setting out for Antarctic wastes or Himalayan mountains, is, we admit, asking for adventure, and we marvel at his news from nowhere when he returns. But the more modest wanderings of most of us—whether to the Pyrenees or the Italian lakes, or, for that matter, along the coast-line of Sussex or into the Shropshire hills: there seems little here for wonder. A stolen passport, a puncture, losing one’s way, whether on a map or on an unfamiliar menu—this is the small price we may have to pay for abandoning the safety of the holiday-camp or the boarding-house lounge on the front.And yet the most staid of journeys is always more than it seems, for it is a human thing to do: with possibilities, therefore, which we can never guess at in advance. The most domesticated dog is incapable of travel: he is moved by the necessity of food and the demands of his kind. He is quite incapable of arriving, early or late. For travel is always a choice: something to be begun, and, let us hope, to be safely ended; but to be interrupted and altered, too. And it involves other people. However solitary a traveller may think himself to be, however silent he may stand on a peak in Darien, the point of his wonder, the purpose of his journey, is always in the end linked up with his freedom. He might have stayed at home, he might have crossed the mountains by another pass. And all would have been different.
Ruins and Revival
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J. 
Published: July 2007

These were men of mercy whose godly deeds have not failed. Ecclus. 44, 10.There are still a great many people in England today who regard Catholics as strange and even sinister folk who worship with strange rites in a foreign tongue, render allegiance to the Pope of Rome and have a notable reverence for the Mother of Christ. Yet four hundred years ago there was scarcely a man, woman or child in England who did not accept these rites and this allegiance and this reverence as part of their daily lives, as had their forefathers for many centuries before them. Gathered around this temporary altar, to be present once again at the eternal sacrifice of Calvary within these ruins of a once magnificent abbey, our minds and imaginations inevitably take us back to those days of Catholic England when the great abbey church of St Mary at Hayles resounded by day and night to the prayers of the Cistercian monks who had dedicated their lives here to the service of God and of their fellow-men.Nearly nine hundred years ago Hayles Manor came into the possession of one William Leuric of whom it is recorded that he freed twelve serfs here. In 1246 Richard, Earl of Cornwall, founded the Abbey of St Mary at Hayles in fulfilment of a vow made on escaping from shipwreck. A few years later his son presented to the abbey church the venerated relic known as ‘the Holy Blood of Hayles’, contained in a crystal phial and believed to contain some of the blood shed by our Redeemer on Calvary, which, until it was ruthlessly destroyed by Cromwell’s agents at the destruction of the monastery, was the venerated object of pilgrimage for countless devout men and women both from this country and from over the seas.
A Century of Catholic Intellectual Life
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

Obviously enough a short article on the history of Catholic thought in England in the last hundred years can only suggest a few thoughts of a general nature, for a mere date list without detailed historical interpretation would be useless, and several volumes would be needed for the latter task. A hundred years ago Catholic thought in England was broadening under the influence of Wiseman and Newman. It is, however, a mistake to think that they created it, for behind them lies the solid historical and spiritual interests of the priests of the penal days: strong controversialists, such as Milner, historians of the type of Lingard, and writers like Butler and Challoner, were all massively English in their virtues and prejudices. Their thought was unspeculative, concrete, and strongly, though not deeply, based on the Latin Fathers.With Wiseman and Newman, new influences were brought to bear which served to constitute the pattern of Catholic thought for the next fifty years. Wiseman with his generous, though somewhat undisciplined, imagination brought Catholic England into contact with the thought of the Munich circle and of the French Liberal school. For Wiseman these movements involved a vision of the restoration of the faith, but a glance at Ward’s Life makes it clear that his hopes rested on an inadequate intellectual synthesis, in that it was too strongly influenced by theological Traditionalism and implied a naive view of Liberalism. It was, in short, a Catholic variety of the early nineteenth century theologies of feeling. This statement serves to stress the interesting, though often forgotten, fact that the thinkers of the Catholic Restoration knew little of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages, and what they did see they tended to misunderstand as they saw it reflected in the blurred mirror of Romanticism.
‘A Great Idea Extinct’
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey 
Published: July 2007

Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which paved the way for the re-establishment of the Hierarchy twenty-one years later, brought no relief to the Religious Orders of men. Indeed it considerably increased the disabilities to which they had been so long subjected. Referring to Jesuits and members of other Orders, the Act states that ‘it is expedient to make provision for the gradual suppression and final prohibition of the same’. It goes on to enact that every member of such an order actually in England must register with the local clerk of the peace within six months, under penalty of £50 for each month of unregistered residence. Any member landing in England thereafter is to be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour and banished for life. It is made an offence, punishable by fme and imprisonment, to receive the vows of Religious in England or Ireland, and the person making vows is liable to banishment for life. An attempt to repeal these clauses was made in 1846, but without success. It is difficult to realise that when the Oxford Movement was in full flood the great Religious Orders were outlawed and doomed to extinction.Time was to show that these vicious laws were still-born and would never be invoked. It is easy to be wise after the event. The years between 1829 and 1850 that achieved so much for the Church were, for the Religious, a time of grave anxiety and uncertainty. Their strength lay in their schools. It was only here that they could attempt any degree of community life, and it was from their schools that they hoped to draw recruits. The French Revolution had driven to England the schools that had for so long rendered distinguished service beyond the seas. Long before Emancipation the Benedictines were firmly established at Ample-forth and Downside.
Mr Dawson and Christendom
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

Among the historians of Christian culture alive today, two stand out with particular distinction: M. Etienne Gilson and Mr Christopher Dawson. They are both prolific writers, and neither is always equal to his own standard; but their best work is of a very high quality indeed. These qualities differ, however, and it is interesting to compare diem. Both men are scholars through and through, and both possess to a very unusual degree the real historian’s gift of generalising from particular data. But their points of view differ, and their data. M. Gilson is a connoisseur of ideas; of other men’s ideas, in studying which he discovers his own. He knows much about many human minds, precisely in so far as these minds have become articulate in conceptual thought, and expresses this thought in words and writing. An expert in philosophies, he is scrupulously careful to respect his documentary data; but he wrings all he can out of it. For he makes it his business to discern and define what is individual and original in each thinker he studies; to study therefore each case in and for itself before passing on to another one. Then, having so treated a number of cases, he pauses to consider interconnections; and so draws up patterns of intellectual transmission and differentiation. All his work is a study of minds in their expressed ideas; with a view, first, to discovering originality and then to tracing derivations.Mr Dawson’s very different work is harder to characterise. His range is of course wider, materially, but it is less abstract. He is called a philosopher of history, but he is hardly a historian of philosophy. Though his work teems with individual testimonies he never, or scarcely ever, pauses long to consider an individual.
One Way Home
Authors: Leigh Margaret 
Published: July 2007

‘Laetati sumus pro diebus, quibus nos humiliasti, annis quibus vidimas mala.’ (Ps. 89.)There are as many roads to Rome as there are travellers. Each one’s experience is different, so that the record of each journey has a unique value. I was a girl of eighteen when the Church first attracted me, and a woman of fifty-four when I was finally received. What follows is the story of a long, bitter and unavailing struggle against the endless patience of God.I was the only child of an Oxford don who died young, and was brought up in the traditional beauty of an ancient university town. My mother was a devout High Anglican, but very tolerant: religion was never forced on me, and as a child I took little or no interest in it. At seventeen I read a little Plato at school, and thus discovered a new world of spiritual values. In this way, helped by my mother’s influence, and probably impelled also by some hidden process of inward conversion, I was drawn towards the religion which had hitherto been to me mere words and conventional churchgoing. I began to go to church of my own will, and to read the gospels, The Imitation of Christ, a book of selections from the German mystics, Dante, and St Augustine’s Confessions. There also developed a profound interest in the contemplative life, which persisted, sometimes consciously, but more often in secret, through all the years of my infidelity, working like a recurrent fever in the system. At this time I seriously thought of becoming a Catholic, and was encouraged by my mother, who, like so many Anglicans, had a great admiration for Rome, combined with an intensely patriotic attachment to her national church. I had also a secret desire, which I kept to myself, of eventually joining one of the Contemplative Orders.
The Collapse of a Civilsation
Authors: Mathew Gervase 
Published: July 2007

Shortly after the year 400 the poet Prudentius wrote that the Roman Empire had never been more flourishing nor so happy. All the evidence that we possess tends to show that it seemed eternal and impregnable to its citizens. It was impossible for them to conceive of their life without it. The Western provinces formed a single, carefully administered state, covering modern England, France, the Netherlands, Western Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, North Africa, and part of the Balkans. All were joined by a common culture, a common way of life, the common use of Latin. There were close economic links with the Eastern provinces of the Empire grouped round the other end of the Mediterranean. Here, Greek was the common language instead of Latin and great cities like Antioch and Alexandria had come to play roles paralleled today by New York and Chicago.In the year 400, the young Emperor in the East was brother to the Emperor of the West and was thought of as his partner in a single sovereignty. The partnership seemed indissoluble. In the words of the greatest of fourth-century poets, ‘All Roman subjects were citizens of a single city, children round a single hearth’. The Roman way of life was prized as the common heritage of all free men. During the last forty years there had been a great increase in legislation in the West. For the most part, it had been enlightened and progressive and it regulated to the smallest detail the activities of every citizen.