bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Catholic Tradition in Wales
Authors: Lewis Saunders 
Published: July 2007

It is not merely because these words are penned in an hotel under the shadow of the Cathedral of Ghent that I remark upon certain associations between Belgium and Wales, certain important lessons that Wales might learn from Belgium. Recent literary researches have revealed the debt of Welsh poets of the fourteenth century to the Flemish town poetry of that period. In our own day some Belgian social works have attracted attention in Wales. Belgium like Wales is a small country, much industrialized, and Belgium has also a bi-lingual problem which it has settled or is settling in a manner that Wales would do well to study. In fact, Belgium is one of the small countries of Latin Europe from which Wales might learn some important lessons.But more than this; Belgium is one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe and in the world. Now let us suppose that my fellow-Catholics in South Wales, who are mostly, one may presume, of Irish origin and very many of whose parents came there from Ireland during the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, had emigrated not to South Wales, but to Belgium, what would have been their history? We may assume with some confidence that they would to-day be Flemish-speaking citizens of Belgium, would have adopted Belgium as their own country, and would be enriching its civic as well as its religious life; would have become one with its people. But in Wales it has been otherwise.
St. Raymund and the Decretals
Authors: Farrell Ambrose 
Published: July 2007

The present year marks two notable anniversaries associated with events which had wide spread importance, though very different results within the area of Law. The one was the publication of the famous Decretals of Gregory IX in 1234, a compilation of ecclesiastical law brought together by a Dominican friar, St. Raymund of Penafort, in the direction of centralization in Church government, which took its rise from the great Hildebrand, steadily but surely moved forward through the reigns of successive popes, and finally almost came to rest with Pope Gregory IX. Then there is that other most tragic event, three hundred years later, in 1534, the passing of the Act of Supremacy, whereby the death blow was struck at Canon Law, as far as England is concerned, and any lively influence that it might still have exerted on our own legal institutions was stifled at its source, though in shadowy forms it lingered on. But in the following year even the study of Canon Law was crushed out, when Cromwell as Henry VIII’s vicegerent visited the Universities and issued injunctions to the effect that lectures on the Decretals and the conferring of degrees in Canon Law should be abolished. The sequel was a notable depression also in the study of civil law in this country.All but the prejudiced sectarian have come to acknowledge the Papacy as a wonderful piece of machinery and organization, not only within the sphere of religion and political prestige, but as a centre of law and government.
Joshua or Judges?
Authors: Foster P. D. 
Published: July 2007

Our only English Dictator, Cromwell, has suffered from being sandwiched between a martyred and a merry monarch. And his rule of the Saints was not more acceptable to Cromwell’s contemporaries than his memory has been to us. But to-day, confronted by the prospect of everlasting government, not by Dictators, but Cunctators, we are changing front and on all sides above the click of knitting needles, the clink of port-glass or the clank of trucks, hear the cry: ‘We want a Mussolini.’Rather more than a century ago, our attitude to the great revolutionary Corsican was to make a bogey of him: ‘Boney will get you.’ Then we opposed foreign political revolutions while inaugurating our own more fundamental Industrial one; to-day we admire the foreigners’ polity and only fight shy of it because it may involve a new economic system also. We cannot help thinking that we might like the Soviets no more than the Saints.
Very Silly Symphony
Authors: Berry Hugh 
Published: July 2007

I ALWAYS read with the greatest interest the pronouncements of the two schools of theatrical critics of the Film, the ‘whole-hoggers’ and the ‘half-and-halfers’ : fairly represented respectively by Mr. St. John Ervine and Mr. Sydney Carrol. Mr. Ervine and the whole-hoggers—with whom I am not going to bother either myself or my readers here—regard a Cinema as exclusively a place for nit-wits to which nobody of the intelligence of Mr. Ervine would ever resort, unless the Film happens to be an exact reproduction of a successful stage play. The only reason advanced for the popularity of the Cinema is that admirably comfortable seats are provided, and that Jack and Jill can spend a much pleasanter evening there than at home. The half-and-halfers treat the Cinema with a benign tolerance, regarding it as the Theatre‘s rather inky baby brother, who requires occasional pats on the back but must on no account be spoiled by over lavish praise. ‘If,’ wrote Mr. Carrol, in an article in The Daily Telegraph some Thursdays ago,‘you have any regard for the beauty and clarity of English speech correctly spoken, the grace and charm of English manners (in proper exposition), the sympathy and comprehension of English understanding, see that these precious things receive their tribute in the only place where they can be practised and reviewed at their best, the English Theatre.’Now that may be very true and noble, but it led me to ask the question, is it relevant to the topic of the relations of the Theatre and the Film? The art of the Film should not, so all its greatest exponents constantly tell us, compete with the art of the Theatre; it should be complementary to it.
Reflections on The End of An Era
Authors: Prince J. F. T. 
Published: July 2007

Dr Niebuhr has given us a book’ not unlike M. Berdyaev's End of Out Time. Both works lead us to deplore the complacency of Conservatism (as we know it) and the hypocrisy of Mercantile Christianity. Both books drive us to an alternative; with M, Berdiaeff we must choose between the humanistic individualism of the Renascence and Christian individualism, while Dr Niebuhr in impressing upon us the pharisaical injustice of this closing era would induce (it seems) an aggressive and vindictive Christianity.While M. Berdyaev may be more profound and nearer to Catholic vision, we cannot deny that the author of ‘Reflections on the End of an Era’ is more startling—may even give us more food for thought; and we are provoked to examine for ourselves the antithesis accounting for the attitude indicated in Dr Niebuhr's book—as much as to insist on the only true remedy-a Revolution based on the charity of Christ, Catholicism. The spirit of Conservatism, if we take it to mean the spirit of sheer negative laissez-faire in matters of economic justice, is derived largely from a sense of well-being, a personal satisfaction which we wish to prolong. We prosper: those who are our immediate responsibility prosper: at least we do not want; the business of blind and wholehearted conservatism is the Past; and the Present is no more than its legacy. Our concern for the future is limited to our care for our present ease.
Also A Leader
Authors: Codd E. 
Published: July 2007

A month or two ago, happening to be in Cologne, I looked in at the Church cf the Friars Minor to say a prayer at Adolph Kolping’s grave. Not that I felt that he needed any memento of mine, but because of those words he wished to be inscribed on the plain stone that covers his tomb:
Here RestsAdolph KolpingBorn December 8th, 1813.Died December 4th, 1865.He asks for the charity of a prayer.The little sanctuary was gay with the first spring blossoms, golden tulips and yellow daffodils ranged around the grave flanked by two great brown laurel wreaths with orange and black ribbons, the colours of the Catholic Journeymen’s Association, of which he was the founder. And they drifted in, by twos and threes or in little groups, as they always do, sturdy fair-haired lads with heavy rucksacks and dusty boots and knelt down before their Father’s grave to give him of their charity because he desired it so.On this occasion, however, I noticed that they did not leave the church after they had said their prayer, but moved off to a little table near the altar rails on which lay an open book in which they all inscribed their names, I thought at first it was some sort of visitors’ book, until a notice caught my eye requesting that no candles should be lighted before the grave nor any other rite performed that might in any way anticipate the decision of the religious authorities and prejudice Father Kolping’s Cause.
Herman Bahr
Authors: Raybould A. N. 
Published: July 2007

Herman Bahr's death in Munich on the 14th of January awakened many literary memories. A patriarch in the world of letters, Bahr's name had been identified with many of the thought-phases that had passed over Europe in the last fifty years. Though an unbeliever for the greater part of his life, Herman Bahr astonished his friends and associates by returning in later life to the faith of his lathers, as he had astonished them by accepting wholeheartedly the old Austrian regime after being a political innovator, even a socialist. His mind was a prism which had reflected the colours of many men's minds, a sort of kaleidoscope which recorded the passing pictures of his time, but with a certain and very marked stamp of his own. This is his special claim to interest.Full of sympathy with the world in which he lived, a sympathy which never left him—for he remained a young writer in spite of his years—Bahr was always the man with his finger on the pulse of the times, who felt instinctively every change before it had declared itself; he was the literary barometer foretelling every variation in art and literature before such variations were observed by others. He called himself and was called by others the ‘man of tomorrow,’ and when he appeared as the man of yesterday it was because he saw in some distant yesterday an inevitable tomorrow.An essayist, a novelist, a playwright, a wit, condensing into words the thought-fluids of his time, Bahr's mind changed with every passing year, until it moulded itself finally within the philosophy of the Catholic Church.
Preliminaries to Catholic Action
Authors: Quinlan John 
Published: July 2007

I write, first, as one of the ‘young people ‘ to whom the advocates of Catholic Action seem especially to appeal and, secondly, as a provincial.What exactly is happening in this Catholic Action campaign?Now and then, at the invitation of devoted men, a lecturer from London or Liverpool descends to harangue us on Catholic Action or to show us some phase of its workings. Who are ‘us’? A group of people representing 1 in 1,000 of the available Catholic population, rising half-a-dozen times a year under the stimulus of a dinner or a dance to 25 in 1,000 and once each year, at a Sunday evening cinema-hall Rally, to 100 in 1,000. And of this weekly or fortnightly band, Apostolic in its diminutiveness at least, who are the regular components? A few married women, a few teachers, a few working-girls; to four of these add one man —a clerk, a plumber, a custom-officer or an out-of-work.Now, when the lecturer has departed, what in the main is the idea left uppermost in the minds of the hearers of the word? During the lecture they have been galvanized and uplifted by the nobility of the appeal; inspired with generosity, they have been impelled towards the brink. But, as the words which pass betwen them show, when they endeavour to plunge from that brink of noble principles into the complexities of direct action in their own private lives and spheres of existence, they are partly perplexed and partly dispirited.
The Novelist and Playwright in Catholic Action
Authors: Leitch N. S. 
Published: July 2007

SINCE the preoccupations of an age are expressed in its current catchwords, it is perhaps not strange that our contemporaries should employ, in every context and without examination, the idiom of pseudo-economics in which is enshrined commercial wisdom. Among the stock phrases which recur in everyday conversations, and which appear to exercise an incantatory power over the minds of those who speak or hear them, ‘the law of supply and demand’ is most frequently evoked; not necessarily because the speaker is intimate with the workings of this mysterious law, but because it is intended to place the discussion, whether moral, political or artistic, upon a wholesome basis of commercial expediency.Thus it is argued that in the work of the English playwright or novelist there is no scope for Catholic Action, not because of any incompatibility in the activities which it is proposed to combine, but because ‘the public does not want religion; there is no demand for it.’Before trying the strength of this objection, it will be good to question whether a medium as comparatively frivolous as that in which either the playwright or the novelist works, can be employed in Catholic Action. To do this we must examine the common function of the playwright and novelist, which is to provide the public with a means of living vicariously, projected into an imagined existence, and thus forgetting present circumstances. Where there is great ignorance of the supernatural, such as religious ‘reformation’ has achieved in English-speaking countries, this escape from the apparent harshness of reality must become particularly desirable.
Lay Initiative in Catholic Action
Authors: Gordon Henry 
Published: July 2007

There is a widespread, if inarticulate, misgiving about Catholic Action which needs ventilation and elimination. A particularly vehement layman might express it in some such terms as these :‘Catholic Action? Ecclesiastical Fascism! A pretext for further encroachment by the clergy on the layman’s business! More clerical domination and interference! More paralysing of lay initiative and endeavour! Apostolate of the Laity! Clerical Gleichschaltung!’The Englishman, especially, has a horror of being ‘organized.’ And organization, it is universally agreed, is of the very essence of Catholic Action. The adoption and organization of an oeuvre by the Hierarchy is precisely what makes that oeuvre entitled to be called Catholic Action. The local establishment and direction of Catholic Action is committed to the parochial clergy. Must we not then infer that the disgruntled layman is right?The most effective way to disillusion him would be, perhaps, to take him abroad to countries where Catholic Action is really in action and is already fully organized and vigorous. Failing that, these few considerations may help to shake the prejudices.All depends on what we mean by ‘organization.’ In the strict sense in which the word is applied to Catholic Action, organization, so far from imposing, excludes uniformity: it fosters rather than hinders individual initiative and enterprise. The point cannot be explained better than in the words of the Holy Father himself.Organization in general means the unity of many members of which each preserves its own particular nature, functions and life, but which together pursue a common aim and concur in the formation of a single body, itself subordinated to one single vital principle.
Poetry and Intelligibility
Authors: Petre M. D. 
Published: July 2007

Luminous shadow and dusky light.—We, who are not poets, but who dare to maintain that poetry is an essential element of our intellectual life, are just now the somewhat helpless witnesses of a discussion in which we are not invited to take a part; a discussion of experts; and yet a discussion in which we are deeply interested even if we be kept outside it.There are two parties to that discussion; one for whom poetry has, essentially, no relation to thought, but springs from an emotion of the soul of the poet which he transmits to his hearers in words, indeed, but not in any kind of definite thought; the other, and older school, for whom thought is not, indeed, the whole of poetry, but is certainly one of its elements, and is of its very essence.To take, first, the former school, as presented by one or two of its leading advocates.Mr. A. E. Housman says: The human faculty which dominated the eighteenth century and informed its literature was the intelligence, and that involved, as Arnold says, ‘some repressing and silencing of poetry’ And again: When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, / cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas.Again, although it is almost impossible to find pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning, yet meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.
Enlisting Revolution
Authors: Prince J. F. T. 
Published: July 2007

In the uncertain associations it evokes, Revolution is hardly a word with one meaning. We may deplore the revolutionary economics of Karl Marx and applaud the revolutionary pedagogics of Don Bosco. The Revolte des Anges, Lucifer's assertion of self-subsistence and equality with God, the insolence of our first parents, were (it may be urged), no less revolution than the subversive mission of Jesus Christ who came to overthrow the powers of Evil, the false privilege and the unreal values they had inspired.Or do we prefer to call Christianity counter-revolution —perceiving in it the re-establishment of human-divine intercourse, ultimate incorporation with God, through submission and service? Perceiving in Catholicism the subordination of self in contradistinction to the Satanic assertion of the Ego; service among men as opposed to the primeval assimilation of the meta-human, the snatching at the high-hanging fruit in the garden? Must we accept counterrevolution as the more accurate Christian nomenclature? For Joseph de Maistre, you will remember, insists that ‘Contre-révolution ne doit pas être une révolution contraire mais le contraire d’une révolution.’Indeed, thus considered, the mission of Our Lord, consisting, as it did, in the reinstatement of humility, as opposed to revolt against the Divine Mind, was essentially counter-revolution. Revolution, de Maistre goes on to tell us, is essentially Satanic in that it is destructive and not creative (‘car détruire n’est pas faire’). Yet, while de Maistre and his fellows to-day insist that the nature of counter-revolution is non-revolutionary and purely reinstative, it is yet insisted in the same breath that its constructiveness does not derive ‘from hope of restoring the past.’
Film and Catholic Action
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand 
Published: July 2007

In a letter to Canon Brohée, President of the Centre Catholique d’Action Cinématographique, His Holiness Pope Pius XI wrote, April 25th, 1934:‘The discoveries of Science are also the gifts of God which we must use for His glory and the extension of His kingdom.‘Catholics of all countries of the world ought to consider it a duty in conscience to busy themselves with this question which is growing in importance. The cinema is going to become the greatest and most efficacious means of influence, more efficacious even than the Press, for some films are seen by millions of people. It is therefore highly desirable that organized Catholics should occupy themselves constantly with the Cinema in their meetings to promote Catholic Action and in their programmes of study.’On reading this letter the loyal Catholic might excusably heave a sigh of relief. Owing to the American Boycott much has been said for and against the Cinema. Some people have deplored its influence and condemned it as a medium; others have accepted it, but entirely misunderstood its power and therefore its danger; some of us have even ventured to make films . . . But amid this mass of conflicting opinion, one thing is now clear, that the Holy Father not only encourages the use of the Cinema, but considers that it is our duty to use it in the Apostolate. This in itself is a great step forward, and will relieve many a dubious conscience.
The Survival of Blessed Thomas More
Authors: O'Sullivan Richard 
Published: July 2007

One of the noteworthy features of our time is the revival of interest in the life and letters of Blessed Thomas More.These two new Lives of the Beatus are added evidence of this interest, and of its universal character. The one is by a non-Catholic Englishwoman, who is a scholar of the University of Oxford, the other is by a Catholic American, who is a member of the English Faculty at Harvard.Though there are already (we are told by Miss Routh) twenty-four English Lives of More of different periods, one could not spare either of these new volumes. Of a truth, as Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth is here reported to have said, Sir Thomas More is one of the figures of abiding interest in History.This multiplication of Lives of Thomas More goes with the reproduction of his English works in the elegant edition that is in course of publication by Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode under the general editorship of W. E. Campbell, with the co-operation of Professor A. W. Read, Professor R. W. Chambers and Mr. W. A. Doyle Davidson: a notable constellation of Catholic and and non-Catholic scholars. The publication in this series of Harpsfield’s Life of Thomas More has given us, from the pen of Professor Chambers, an enduring essay ‘On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School,’ the main thesis of which may be said to be that the English of Alfred survived as a literary language, during the centuries when French and Latin were the official languages of Law and Government, through the religious writings of Englishmen who wrote on mystical subjects for the use of English communities of religious women.
India's Connection With Britain
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E. 
Published: July 2007

Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India? It makes one think of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of B. D. Basu's Rise and Consolidation of the Christian Power in India, of the Cambridge History of British India, and The Indian Empire. The title is entrancing—and not a little enigmatic: for the authors never tell the reader in so many words what exactly they mean by ‘fulfilment.’ Whatever it be, this History of the British Raj is as lively as the Cambridge tomes are stodgy, and as impartial as Major Basu is partizan: it refutes its own motto—a saying of the Iron Duke—’that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ Nothing is more needful to-day than that the British mind should thus attend: it will henceforth be able to do so, thanks to Messrs. Thompson and Garratt, without tears, though perhaps not without a good deal of mortification.‘It is often said,’ observe our authors (p. 273), ‘that Britain acquired her Indian Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness: the epigram has been overworked. From Clive’s time onwards, British India never lacked minds seeing and planning far ahead.’ True, the Empire began as a mercantile adventure—and ‘of all the European interloping nations we were the last and most reluctant to draw the sword, even in defence’ (p. 5). Yet already in 1618 Sir Thomas Roe said: ‘Assure you, these people are best treated with the sword in one hand and caducean in the other’ (p. 17); and by 1641 the East India Company had fortified its factory at Masulipatam.