bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘The Deputy’
Authors: Lawler Justus George 
Published: July 2007

A few months after the beginning of the second World War, Father Max Metzger, founder of the Una Sancta Brotherhood, wrote a letter from his prison cell pleading with Pius XII for the convocation of a council of peace and of reunion. This letter—the full English text appears for the first time in the new American quarterly, Continuum, Summer, 1963—has a bearing not only on the prehistory of Vatican II, but even more significantly on a recent dramatic production, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative or The Deputy), by a young German publisher’s assistant, Rolf Hochhuth. In the play as in the letter, the Pope was requested to speak forthrightly in the name of justice; in the play the request is openly ignored, while the fate of Max Metzger’s letter remains unknown. In both instances the question that seems to rise spontaneously concerns the failure of the Pope to fulfil his role as servant of the servants of God.The play has been recognized in the European and American press as perhaps the most controversial drama of the post-war era. An English translation is about to appear; it will be produced in Stockholm by Ingmar Bergman; Georges de Beauregard is filming it in France; and it will open next season in London and New York. While there is no doubt that some of this immediate fame is due to the dramatic merits of the piece, an even larger part is probably the result of the ‘scandal’ on which it is based, on the alleged failure of Pius XII to speak out on the persecution of the Jews. It may be observed in passing that, aside from the religious issue, much German acclaim for the work probably derives from the national need for a catharsis of the Nazi past, and, on the West-Berlin theatrical scene, from the desire to achieve a local work comparable to Brecht’s social dramas.
Contraceptives and Natural Law
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

It is the common teaching of the Church, reaffirmed by successive popes and to be found in all reputable textbooks of moral theology, that the use of mechanical contraceptives which interfere with intercourse is always wrong. Whether this common teaching amounts to the ordinary magisterium in the technical sense and is therefore infallible is another matter, but short of such assurance it would be hard to find a clearer guide for the Christian who wants to know what he should do or not do. It should be emphasized that even those theologians who think there are legitimate uses for the pill nearly always distinguish between this and mechanical contraceptives. It is indeed clear that these are two quite different matters; contraceptives interfere directly with the act of intercourse whereas the pill does not.It is a mistake to suppose that we do not know anything until we know it infallibly. There are a great many topics about which a Catholic ought to have sure and definite views just because he is a Catholic, even though the infallible magisterium of the Church has not yet pronounced upon them. He should know, for example, without waiting for the pope to tell him, that it is wicked to propose to drop a nuclear bomb on a city under any circumstances. Similarly if a Catholic wants to know whether he should use mechanical contraceptives or not he does not need to wait for an infallible papal pronouncement to get the answer.
African Culture and the West
Authors: Hindmarsh Roland 
Published: July 2007

Now that almost every African country north of Angola and Mozambique is independent, there may be a temptation in Western countries to shrug off entirely the cultural responsibility once held by Britain and France, and to limit Western action in Africa to Oxfam, economic assistance and technical co-operation. With the end of the colonial era, there is an understandable reluctance to create the impression in African countries that they are still in any sense under tutelage to the West, or even that they are undergraduates to be guided by Western dons. Yet there is a danger in leaning over too far backwards. The danger is that fastidiousness in trying to avoid giving the impression of interference may be understood by African minds as evidence that the West, in its unconfessed thoughts, still regards African countries as not mature enough to stand the ordinary rough-and-tumble of international exchange. Their reading of Western delicacy of manner may at bottom be right.These two articles on the role of the West towards culture in Africa begin with the assumption that any culture has something of value to offer to another culture. Western culture is not valueless for Africa, nor is African culture without its lessons for the West. The relationship between cultures should rest on a basis of information and understanding, and their engagement in each other should be forthright enough to make motives clear, and humble enough to accept criticism. This article will try to sketch out some important features of the modern African cultural setting. A second will discuss some of the ways in which the West both is and should be culturally engaged in Africa.
The Current Mood of the Cuban Church
Authors: Dewart Leslie 
Published: July 2007

In a week’s brief and hurried visit to Cuba one can gather nothing more substantial than an impression of the current attitudes, problems and prospects of the Cuban Church. This is not, therefore, a full report, but only a note which attempts to portray the climate of opinion and experience among Cuban Catholics today.To understand better the remarks that follow one should first sketch in the general Cuban background against which the Catholic mood develops. The most obtrusive fact about Cuban daily life today is that the economic situation is very difficult. Though no one actually goes hungry, for some food is always available, the diet is annoyingly unappetizing. Stores offer practically no choice; one simply eats what is available. For the poorest people, especially among the peasants, this is an improvement over the past, but for most Cubans this is a hardship to which they are unaccustomed. All things considered, however, it is rather well borne, an index of which is the lack of general patronage of black markets. Not only food but also clothing is in very short supply. All other ordinary goods are similarly scarce and often not to be found. The distribution system is erratic: today matches have suddenly disappeared from all tobacconists, but beer is available at any bar; tomorrow there is no beer, only cider; then one can get matches, but nothing to drink. Only luxury goods are plentiful. Art galleries exhibit a lavish variety of oils by Cuban artists, and along San Rafael Street one can find tempting bargains in Chinese jade. What the deeper economic situation might be and whether it inclines upwards or not is anyone’s guess—and contradictory estimates are as easily found among Cuban as among American and other experts.
Graham Greene's Indirection
Authors: Poole Roger C. 
Published: July 2007

This article presents a parallel to my previous article entitled ‘Dante’s Indirection’. Both are attempts to study a certain method of achieving effects in a reader, a method to which Kierkegaard gave the title ‘Indirect Communication’. Both articles are concerned basically with Kierkegaard’s technique, due to the angle from which I approach indirect methods in other writers. The expression ‘Indirect Communication’ is ambiguous, as was its use in Kierkegaard’s own hands, and sometimes in studying it, in and for itself, one’s attention is drawn to parallel and much clearer uses of the principle, when one finds it in poets or novelists of less involved theoretical pretensions. Such a man is Graham Greene, novelist, Catholic, individual. It is to him that I turn for further illustration of the principle which seems to defy (in Kierkegaard’s case at least) all attempts at analysis and capture. Critics for over a century, from all countries in the world, have tried to solve the enigma of Kierkegaard’s use of Indirect Communication. Perhaps his Indirection can only be approached indirectly. This essay on three novels of Graham Greene is such an attempt.What did Kierkegaard mean by ‘Indirect Communication’? This he sets forth in a book called The Point of View for my Work as an Author, a book about which he had such terrible doubts that its publication in complete form was eventually only undertaken by his brother after his death. In it he draws the distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ works and the ‘religious’ works in his output with such clarity that we would expect no problem. But he himself obviously felt, and any reader of his works feels immediately, that the explanation he gave in that work simply did not answer to the actual feel of his production, even contradicted its spirit. The later theory does not explain the former practice.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

Now that four years have passed since Le Corbusier’s Dominican church and priory at La Tourette burst on an astonished world with the impact of what was described as ‘the greatest ruin of the twentieth century’, it is possible to have later thoughts and to consider the building not as a major tourist attraction but as a place of prayer and study. It is possible, in fact, to ask whether Le Corbusier’s frequent claims for La Tourette as un lieu de silence, un lieu de repos, are justified. It is good to be there in the empty weeks of early spring, before the tourist hordes descend, and if the endless rains of a wet March have left the concrete mass a leaden grey and the waterspouts are for ever dripping—and the many leaks reveal themselves in new places—then at least one is spared the coloured illusions of the picture postcards.One’s earlier impressions are on the whole confirmed. The building is a triumphant statement, in terms that match the needs of our time, of what an architect of genius can do to give spatial reality to the sacred. The jeu de volumes—that untranslatable phrase that expresses Le Corbusier’s primary concern with the use of space—is even more effective now that even a brief period of time has given the patina of use to what has too often been a sort of cerebration. These buildings, after all, church and refectory and lecture room and cells, arc to be used, not to be written about or even to be admired. And the marvellous counterpoint of solid mass and floating horizontal surface, of the honest concrete and the progressions of the glass, takes on an altogether different meaning when a bell rings and the cloister fills with friars on their way to church or refectory.
Observing Vatican II
Authors: Root Howard 
Published: July 2007

Sometimes the Holy Spirit surprises the Church. Some small decision or simple gesture turns out to be much more significant than many official pronouncements from high authority. We are pulled forward into a quite new situation by a seemingly inadequate cause. In retrospect we wonder at the modest beginnings of this new venture. But then why should the Spirit not move with a gentleness characteristic of God's grace?This, I would suggest, is what happened when Pope John decided to invite official delegate observers from other churches to attend the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. (It was not unnoticed that the invitations were extended to churches and not just to individuals, itself an act of considerable ecumenical importance.) One wonders what Pope John himself thought this gesture would lead to. It is no secret that his decision was criticized and opposed. All that we can suppose is that he persisted in it, despite the criticism and anxiety it aroused, simply from the warmth and fulness of his heart. It was a simple yet profound gesture which, perhaps for that reason, commended itself more to the Spirit than to men. And if there was opposition in Rome, there was a strong reluctance in some Christian communions to take it at its face value, an institutional suspicion that it might be some kind of snare. But the gesture was made, and observers are now a firm part of that vast and complicated reality which is Vatican II.
Crime and Punishment in the United States
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

The first discovery one makes about America—and this affects the subject of crime just as much as any other—is the great variety that exists from state to state, and how strong is the resistance to any encroachment of federal government on state rights, which certainly include disposing of the vast majority of criminal offences committed. The importance of local loyalties is real and enduring. They have their roots in American history: have indeed made America what it is. And this is most certainly true, not only of the state laws themselves (the differences in the matter of divorce from state to state is an obvious example) but of the enforcement of the law and the treatment of offenders. Indeed Mr James Bennett, Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, can say ‘the penal statutes of this country are a mishmash of conflict and variation’.That is why any statistical account of crime in America must be inadequate. The annual report issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, which gives a detailed analysis of crimes committed in the various states, has been described as the cheapest work of fiction in existence. This is a serious libel on a most valuable work, but of course it would certainly help in making a true picture if there were uniformity —or at least consistency—in the penal offences themselves as well as in the punishment they attract, quite apart from widely varying police standards which obviously affect the issue.
Looking at an Election
Authors: Eagleton Terry 
Published: July 2007

There wasn't much heard about Christian belief in the recent British election campaign, in spite of occasional Christian appeals to the candidates’ consciences; but then, with a renewed sense among Christians of the secular significances of the term ‘moral', this lack of directly Christian discussion ought not to be too disturbing: we were, after all, electing a government, not a parish council. What can usefully be looked at, however, is the degree of moral emphasis, in a general sense, in the parties’ programmes: how far was this a humane election ?The Liberal Party is important here, because it focusses a complex of attitudes which have been dominant in British politics over the past few years. At the peak of its form, Jo Grimond's party stood for an impatient, dynamic streamlining of society, a tough concern with efficiency; Liberalism was a force to disperse the cobwebs, and the cobwebs included talk of class-warfare and socialization of industry as much as Tory old-boyism and bungling. There was an attractive radicalism about this, and it won over a good many people who failed to see that dynamism and efficiency are morally neutral terms which can shove out the central moral issues and reduce politics to technique and organization. At the Liberal Party conferences the hall was full of young men rearing to get industry off the ground and eliminate wastage and failure; the talk centred on expansion and cutting through red-tape, progress was the key-term.
Heard and Seen: Television, medium of Reform?
Authors: Thomas Huw Ballard 
Published: July 2007

If all the energy and ingenuity expended on criticizing television were diverted into creating for it, the face of the medium might well be transformed. At the highest level, television is a twentieth-century art form. At all levels, it is an artefact – but an artefact peculiarly subject to the limitations of time and money. Every producer and scriptwriter – cameraman and film editor too – knows the frustration of having to compromise because conditions (physical or economic) make it impossible to do otherwise. Three days of rain during filming and a whole plan must be re-thought. And they know, too, the second wave of frustration when critics, professional and lay, suggest the very things which would have been done if only television were the all-miraculous, ail-endowed medium which those who have little or no practical experience of it suppose it to be.It is a mistake to say, as many do, that ‘television is primarily a form of entertainment’. Television is primarily a medium of communication. That is its alpha and its omega. But entertainment is the use to which it is generally put and it would be naive in the extreme to presume that people buy, or rent, their television sets for any other purpose.
The Church as Institution
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

The Foreword to the original edition of Hans Küng’s Strukturen der Kirche is dated May 1962; the new Foreword to the English translation is dated March 1965. Apart from a Preface by Cardinal Cushing and some paragraphs from Pope Paul’s striking speech at the opening of the second session of Vatican II, no changes seem to have been made for this English edition. One might have expected that a book written on the structures of the Church before the Council had met at all would date painfully after three sessions of the Council and the enormous upheaval in the life of the Church which has accompanied them; and this might seem especially likely for an author whose writings are always ‘conversational’ (or should one say ‘dialogical’), contributions to a continuing debate, or even sometimes publicist, more concerned to change other people’s ideas than to explore ideas in depth. Indeed Küng’s own writings, including this book, have played a considerable part in the upheaval, and no future history of Vatican II will be able to ignore the impact of The Council and Reunion, especially on the English-speaking world.It must then clearly be said that Structures of the Church retains real value and interest even today. This is not to say that a good deal of the rather longwinded book (358 pages in English) has not now outlived its immediate interest, the first part in particular. The general thesis of the book, for instance, that the ecumenical council by human convocation is the representation of the Church as ecumenical council by divine convocation, should by now be familiar to Küng’s more popular presentation of the thesis in The Living Church;
The Catholic‐Orthodox Dialogue
Authors: Georgiadis Helle 
Published: July 2007

With the stage set for a Catholic-Orthodox dialogue one is inclined to welcome any book which might have a bearing on this matter, since the lack of material available in Western languages is a serious difficulty in preparing for such a dialogue. Fr Schmemann, Dean of the Russian Orthodox Seminary in New York, has a long record of ecumenical activity and any book by him is bound to raise hopes among the friends of the Orthodox in the west. It is therefore all the more disappointing that The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy makes such an equivocal contribution to this dialogue.In fairness to the author it must be said that the book, which originally appeared in Russian, was intended for the non-specialist Russian Orthodox of the diaspora. But, as has been shown by the Second Vatican Council, the internal affairs of any Christian communion have ecumenical relevance, and thus what the Orthodox say to each other in these days is also of concern to those outside their communion.The book is a history of the Orthodox Church, starting with the Book of Acts and ending with the Russian Church before the Communist Revolution. This, too, is disappointing, since the last fifty years have raised issues which vitally affect Orthodoxy today, particularly the question of jurisdiction, which will continue to complicate inter-Orthodox relations for many years to come. As an exposition of Orthodoxy Fr Schmemann’s book is unconvincing. His point of view, expressed in the concluding paragraph, that ‘the true Orthodox way of thought has always been historical’ is a very personal one and suggests Western influence which also shows itself in other ways throughout the book.
The Ministry of the Word
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

The phrase ‘ministry of the word’ is still an unfamiliar one even to Catholics who are fairly well instructed in the traditional theology of the eucharist. By comparison with talk about the ‘sacrifice of the mass’ the phrase seems odd, and even perhaps quasi-heretical. Historians of the liturgy can tell us a good deal, of course, about the way in which the ministry of the word, as an original and necessary part of the eucharistic celebration, fell into comparative decay, and indeed became almost entirely forgotten as an object of theological reflection for centuries. But here I want to point to an aspect of this subject somewhat different from that which is given to us by the liturgical historian. There is, I think, an important philosophical truth which needs to be dug up from the liturgical rubble in which we have all been poking around for the last few years, before we can give an adequate definition of the ‘ministry of the word’ as part of the whole eucharistic act, and therefore before we can begin to realise once more in practice what it means.It can be taken as agreed, to begin with, that the eucharistic celebration has to do with the real presence of Christ. It is the permanent sacramental means by which Christ is made present to us and, indeed, in us. But, notoriously, the notion of the presence of Christ has been very variously interpreted.One might put the point by saying that, in the past all the emphasis, in discussion of the real presence, has been upon the reality of the presence, whereas what we need to explore today in order to restore a balanced theology of the eucharist is the presence of the reality.
Church and World
Authors: Replies Dummett 
Published: July 2007

Mr Terry Eagleton made, in his article The Language of Renewal in the October issue of New Blackfriars, some criticisms of certain things I had said in How Corrupt is the Church? in the August issue. I am not replying in any polemical spirit: for I think that much is gravely wrong inside the Church, and that, in seeking to see what is wrong, we are all of us peering through a fog; and so I hope that what I wrote will be both criticised and supplemented. All the same, some clarification on my part may promote fruitful discussion.Mr Eagleton accuses me of ‘accepting and reinforcing a whole social status quo’; and, in this, he regards me as representative of the defects of progressive thought. I should like to rebut this accusation.I might, indeed, claim the highest conceivable authority for the presumption with which he saddles me, that we shall have the poor always with us; but perhaps this would be a misapplication of our Lord’s words. I must, however, repudiate his implication that I regard class division and the inequitable distribution of wealth as desirable. I do not: my views are rather strongly egalitarian. But what I was concerned to suggest was how Christians should behave within a society of which inequality and class division are features. I do not say, what Mr Eagleton attributes to me, that these are the inevitable conditions of human life: but I do say that there is no immediate prospect of their disappearing, at least from Western society.