It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. When, however, what is to be surveyed is the dimly lit and sometimes treacherous field of inter-action between religion and politics, only the most confident of observers would lay claim to any privileged insight. And yet these musings at a monastery window, which is all they can pretend to be, may not wholly lack interest; they are an attempt to glean something of the significance of the contemporary scene in the light of ultimate principles. But the process will demand of us a certain corporate self-scrutiny, and of this a word must be said.

The divine constitution of the Catholic Church, indefectible in its essence and hierarchic in its structure, necessarily precludes any criticism by its members of the Church itself. It is not our business— nor, if we are wise, should it be our wish—to call in question what God has ordained. But the mental attitude engendered by this state of things, one of unquestioning acceptance, can sometimes extend beyond its due limits .and so lead us to leave unexamined what in fact has every claim to searching attention. It is important to know, for example, to the extent that the thing can be ascertained, how far the Church in this or that particular country embodies all that is implied in Catholicism, or how far circumstances of time and place, not excluding the personal limitations of its members, seem to hamper the flowering of the full Christian life.

The ruined Parthenon, as it stands in the lucid splendour of the Athenian sky, enshrines for us not the adolescent worship for which it was designed but the philosophy and art of ancient Greece. It stands as their symbol. In the grove of Mambre, four millennia old, is the tomb of Abraham, our father, where obedience to the one high God lies sleeping until we are all gathered to his bosom. The Roman wall, the arch at Trier, the inscription on the Iron Gates of the Danube, the temples at Baalbek and Timgad, the aqueduct at Segovia, are adequate representatives of the militarism, sanitation and civic creed of Rome. Together these three influences built up the background for the Christian revelation; the basilica of St Peter is reared upon these mighty foundations and transcends them. Europe, as we understand it, is the work of the Catholic Church, and we can ask ourselves today . . . where, then, is the abiding memorial of the greatest of the Church’s intellects, St Thomas Aquinas? Where is the temple of the Solomon of the West?

As the eye looks eastward from the cliffs of Dover to embrace the territory of Europe, it picks out certain well-defined characteristics. The first is the appropriateness of the Roman boundaries, the Rhine and the Danube, with a possible extension to the Carpathians. Beyond these rivers and mountains stretch the vast plains which run into Asia, where Confucius and Mahomet and the Buddha rule instead of Abraham, Socrates and Justinian.