It is no doubt inevitable that the Holy See should have been unjustly condemned and wrongly praised by prejudiced or ill- informed people in this country and elsewhere, especially during the years of war and its aftermath. The Holy Father has been condemned when some word or action of his did not, or was deemed not to, conform to the ideology or bias of the critic, just as he has been praised according to an equally false norm of criticism. If he blessed a group of Catholics who happened to be Italians and soldiers, or expressed approbation of Catholics who happened to be Spanish, or condemned the intrinsic evil of an atheistic Communism propounded by men who happened to be Russians, he was dubbed fascist. If he gave succour to British prisoners of war, condemned the evil of Nazism as propounded by the Germans, or pleaded for the Jews persecuted by the totalitarian states, or welcomed to the Vatican the Allied Commanders and their troops, he was congratulated (grudgingly enough, it is true) on these presumed expressions of approval of the Allied cause.

It could hardly be expected that the run of mankind in this narrow, materialistic, selfish, modem world should appreciate the simple truth that the Holy Father both is and acts as the Vice-regent of Christ upon this earth; and that he has a peculiar obligation of paternity in regard to Catholics of all nations; that he has a God-given duty to proclaim to all men the basic principles of morality and to condemn in no uncertain voice, and without respect of persons, any blatant and general disregard of them; that he is bound to regard himself as the universal protector of those in need and the protagonist of justice for all mankind.

Vezelay is a place extraordinarily little known considering its beauty and historic interest. Situated some 150 miles south-west of Paris, in Burgundy, almost at the very centre of France, it was in the 12th century one of the great shrines of Christendom. To Vézelay pilgrims went from the whole of Europe to pay honour to St Mary Magdalen whose body the Benedictines claimed to have taken there from St Maximin. There in 1146 when the nave of the present basilica stood in all its newness, St Bernard preached the 2nd Crusade before King Louis VII and a multitude assembled from every Christian country. From the pulpit of the basilica 20 years later St Thomas Becket, in exile, solemnly excommunicated Henry II. To Vézelay went Henry’s son, Bichard Coeur de Lion, to take the Cross with Philip Augustus in the 3rd Crusade. St Francis’s first foundation in France was made there, the Cordelerie on the slope of the hill; Brother Pacifieus founded it, and it was to be honoured with a visit from St Louis as he went to the Holy Land. Today only the Basilica remains, and a great wooden cross to commemorate St Bernard’s preaching, and the ruined chapel of the Cordelerie. Vézelay stands a symbol of divided Christendom. The town was the birthplace of Theodore Béza, In 1568 the Protestants captured it, devastated the abbey which had for 30 years been secularised, its monks having long since become odious to the townsfolk, burned the relics, and subjected the Franciscans to the horrible sport of burying two of them up to their necks and playing bowls against them with the heads of their companions.

In European and American publications it is customary to describe the Japanese as a mysterious, impenetrable, deceitful and enigmatical race. To a certain extent, a similar description is made to apply to the Chinese also, with the exception—at least for so long as they still belong to the United Nations—of ‘deceitfulness.’

That East and West are quite different and do not understand one another very well is a generally accepted fact. The Eastern peoples have quite a different spiritual orientation, and for that reason we shall never be able to understand the Japanese and Chinese completely, in the sense of finding an absolutely satisfactory ‘explanation’ of them. Our nervous reactions and sense impressions are quite different from theirs. Our two life-streams—to use that beautiful Oriental metaphor—do not merge. They do not even flow in parallel directions. They have a quite different mental machinery. Our whole brain system, physical energies, reactions to intellectual and sensorial impressions and other unnameable forces of our racial complexion, are different from theirs. The case is not the same with the German or the Frenchman or the member of any other white race. These we can fully understand; we may not agree with them; but their way of doing things and their outlook on life, their objectives are for us reasonable. This is not the case with the Far Easterner. Of course, if we consider the human mind with reference to its essence, we shall find it to be one and the same in all men. Yet this one mind works differently in an Oriental and in an Occidental, so that we are justified in speaking of an Eastern and a Western mind. As an Oriental puts it rather poetically: ‘

Philologists may be interested enough to find out when this word ‘ecology’ became part of the language. Its frequent use in scientific writing today is a portent. The sister-word ‘economy’ has reflected the history of much of our modern thinking about man and mankind in the emphasis laid, not on ‘goods’ themselves as such, but on commerce in and distribution of such goods. Just as, from Devas onwards, there is a growing tendency among economists to consider human, as well as material, factors in the definition of such ideas as prosperity, so a new branch of science has found it increasingly necessary to study in detail what one may call the raw materials of prosperity.

Materially speaking, there are two main aspects of the environment of homo sapiens that repay modern study. One may be summed up under the term exterior influences—climate, housing, clothing, and the like. The others, subject of this short essay, are internal: in a word, man’s diet.

Time was when science seemed to have summed up the whole matter of the human body and how it is nourished, in the three magic words: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. But already the biochemists were beginning to analyse the individual components of each of these, and the necessity for certain minerals—at first the list was limited to iron and calcium—was emphasised, together with observations of their deficiency in the diet of civilised man. A little later, first Lunin and then Hopkins proved that there was a missing factor which the latter called ‘accessory food substances’ and to which Funk gave the name vitamines.