There is such a thing as Progress, even with a capital P. The word has been discredited by those whose concept is superficial; who see plumbing as of the essence of progress, or a higher school-leaving age a gain regardless of what is taught in the schools. Over a short span progress is hard to plot. Fifty years ago people died of starvation in British slums: today no one need starve in Britain. Yet the majority are perhaps less happy in their work. Again, fifty years ago Russians who were sent to Siberia were at least treated as men: today in their slave camps their descendants are treated like beasts, and valued as such. British children are now kept longer at school: yet juvenile delinquency has increased and seems at the moment to become more vicious. In many ways do we see both progress and retrogression active in society, until there appears to be no constant direction, only a heaving flux in men’s affairs. Seeing it, some of us turn cynical or irresponsible, others turn to a brutal materialism, an idealism that condones diabolism as a means to an end that it poisons.

‘We are not islands’, we cannot dissociate ourselves completely from our fellow-men. The sons of Adam are one, although individual. That is perhaps why efforts to found ideal communities, cut off from the rest of the world, fail. Men are of their nature missionaries, they must share and pass on what they possess. Only in a very special way, by abnegation and withdrawing from normal social life, can religious communities survive:

In his study of the tradition of thought in the early Middle Ages, a distinguished historian (Mr Richard Southern) remarks that it should be easier for us today than it was a hundred years ago to understand the fascination of logic for scholars of the eleventh century; for them as for us, ‘Logic was an instrument of order in a chaotic world’. Mr Southern speaks as a historian and a humanist, for whom thought is more immediately apprehended as an orchestral scoring of the themes of human need and of moral concern than in its own proper cogency. Yet the paradox of moral philosophy lies in just this incommensurability of the humane and the analytic: the task of moral philosophy is somehow to mediate; to explore the complexity of the humane and to map it with a disciplined fidelity.

It might very well seem that the scholastic metaphysical tradition exhibits its inadequacy more patently here than anywhere else, with its manuals of moral theology, its solutions of problems of conscience by the numerical assessment of probable opinions, its approximation of moral philosophy to a demonstrative science, and more radically, with just this very metaphysical character itself. It is this last reproach which will specially concern us here. How, it may be felt, can a metaphysics, admittedly taking its point of departure in a physics, practise a fidelity to the complexity of a moral sensibility? Such a metaphysics can only be a bogus physics, setting up a fictitious world of quasi-physical entities, the behaviour of which could only serve as an excessively crude model for the delicately particular moral decisions and options of our humane activity.

The first attempts in the realm of worker education in the United States were made by Father Paul Dietz, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, more or less at the same time as Father Plater, S.J., was laying the foundations for the Catholic Social Guild in England. In 1910 he started to organize the scattered activities of individual Catholics in the fields of social education and action. He was spurred on by the hostile attitude of a number of Catholics to the American Federation of Labour (AFL), an association of craft unions headed by Samuel Gompers, and so with a group of Catholic AFL officials he founded the Militia of Christ for Social Services. The object of the Militia was to prevent socialist influence from increasing in the unions and to combat the ‘integrist’ Catholics who would have condemned the AFL out of hand. In the following year the Social Service Commission of the American Federation of Catholic Societies was formed with Father Dietz as its secretary, and with its growth the Militia gradually declined. In 1920 came the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the peace-time successor of the National Catholic War Council, set up by the American bishops to minister to general Catholic life in the U.S.A. They appointed as head of its Department of Social Action Mgr John A. Ryan, who had been the author of the progressive ‘Bishops’ Programme of Social Reconstruction’ published in 1919.

Until the depression of the 1930’s most of the social study and social action of Catholics in the U.S.A. was stimulated, encouraged and initiated by the Social Action Department under Mgr Ryan’s dynamic leadership.

Garthewin is the name of one of the most gracious of Welsh houses, but by this it has come to mean even more for the life of Wales. For here, serenely set in the hills and looking down to the vale of Elwy, a Georgian mansion, with all its privilege of place, has become a centre for the Welsh theatre. In 1937, Mr Robert Wynne, the owner of Garthewin, decided to convert a bam on his estate into a little theatre. The barn itself was built about 1770 of undressed stone, but within it had two remarkable features—a pair of brick arches—which lent themselves to the perfect adaptation of a simple building into a place where plays could be worthily, and audibly, performed. One arch forms the proscenium, and the theatre itself can accommodate about two hundred people. At Christmas it is the setting for the celebration of Midnight Mass.

To begin with, Garthewin was used for occasional performances by amateur companies. It is not easily reached, and its immediate audience is drawn from the villages and scattered farms nearby. But at once its autonomy as a theatre, free from the irrelevant associations of chapel vestries and village halls where plays are generally only a means of raising funds for some local cause, gave a new seriousness to Welsh drama. Experimental plays and translations of European classics found a home at Garthewin, and the theatre, lying in the very shadow of the mansion, seemed to symbolize the emergence of the Welsh drama as the new inheritor of that unbroken cultural tradition which is the glory of Wales.

Above the bedclothes, over the sheets, sometimes men awaking will stare at their hands in amazement—dead fish gleaming in the moonlight; and, if it is stormy outside and the wind is howling, sometimes those fish will seem to twitch as if a fin or flipper moved. But reach for the nearby lamp, flick it on and such ghostly imaginings vanish. Like the rest of the body, the hands become taken for granted: men forget the mystery of their flesh, and not for one instant when they look at it do they remember those seven mysterious layers of skin which protect them. Custom has dulled their eyes to the miracle of consciousness.

François Mauriac, I would submit, might be described as a novelist of the seventh skin. He is concerned not with outward appearances, but with the heart; not with neat artistic designs executed as an end in themselves, but with words as a means of testifying to the Word. Reality is the aim of his fiction—a reality whose drama is heightened because it is played against an eternal background. He has written a Life of Jesus (1937) and knows that only Jesus, had he so decided, could have written the perfect novel because, being perfect man, his vision was perfect. Others can only hope to report upon the world as they see it and, being fallen creatures, their vision may be faulty. It is the load that all artists who are Christians must accept and carry on their backs.