It would be interesting to know in what sense the Archbishop of Canterbury used the word ‘propaganda’ in introducing to the public, in his speech to Convocation, the pamphlet Infallible Fallacies as a useful antidote to the ‘intensified propaganda’ of the Catholic Church. This word has almost lost its primary and original sense, and has acquired a loaded and sinister meaning. What it usually signifies today is spreading or bolstering up an idea by suppressing half the truth about it, using false emphasis, suggestion and even direct mis-statement, and especially by employing a technique of making isolated and probably hypothetical instances appear as widely applicable generalisations. Inevitably, when the word is used, it raises in the mind an imaginative picture embodying these associations. It is strange then that His Grace should have used it, without explanation, when speaking officially on the delicate topic of the greatest Church in Christendom and the methods it uses in proclaiming its teaching, and it is still stranger that he should have selected for commendation, as a defence against this teaching, a pamphlet which exhibits, though clearly unconsciously and in ignorance, many of the characteristics of propaganda in this secondary and less reputable sense.

The following article is concerned with discovering a basis for a more mature spiritual life, especially in the case of men. Three different viewpoints are successively adopted, from each of which man’s development is traced from childhood, through adolescence to complete maturity; at each stage far-reaching changes are seen to take place, and about the age of forty to forty-five a crisis normally occurs, which we shall have to discuss in some detail.

A child is utterly self-centred, though his charm and simplicity prevent this from shocking us as it would in a grown-up. In his actions he always aims at getting his own way, which to a large extent means satisfying his physical needs.

As he grows into a youth he enters into fuller possession of his mental and physical powers. He is haunted by the spirit of adventure and by vague ambitions (ambition itself, less generous, comes only later), for there seems no limit to what he is able to do. But for all his openness of heart he remains somewhat self-centred; it is the things that will allow him to live his own life, with his own personality, that he is striving after.

It has for long been a source of disquiet to the public conscience that Great Britain is among the very few western countries which find it necessary to retain the death penalty. This policy is only a continuance of a curious national tradition of ruthlessness about executions, for although England had always made a minimal use of torture, and was a pioneer in prison reform, she retained on her statute books until well into the nineteenth century more capital offences than any other civilised country. For Catholics, teaching on the morality of a death sentence is clear. As Mr Hollis points out in his admirable contribution to Messrs Paget and Silverman’s book, ‘It is certainly the teaching of the Christian religion that life is sacred, that it is God who gives life, and therefore only reasons of absolute necessity could justify the taking of life’. The Church has never condemned capital punishment as such; in practice it connived at or even demanded its use by the secular arm for heresy, sorcery, and other offences, and when the popes held temporal power it was in operation in the papal states. Catholics may, one concludes, support capital punishment if it is necessary. But is it necessary? Are there really circumstances in which the only right thing Christians can do with a fellow-citizen is to break his neck? That is the question which the Royal Commission, which recently reported, was appointed in 1949 to answer.

The generalities of geography, or a shape on the map, do little to prepare you for a new land. After the timeless, torpid days of sea and sun, the gradual bulk of a strange continent seems a heroic gesture against the empty world of water. And the introduction to South America is a warning that you must forget what you expected to see. For the islands of Fernando de Noronha, two hundred miles still from the Brazilian coast, a penal settlement for political prisoners, stand hostile and apart, with their toppling peaks and deserted bays. This is what land can be like; first a geology, and then the fantastic thing within that man can make of it.

Brazil is the fourth largest country in the world. More than two thousand miles from north to south, as many from east to west, and with a coastline of four thousand five hundred, it sprawls, huge and unmanageable in mind. Absurd to begin to write of it in terms of ports of call: the half-day visit and the scheduled sights. Yet there is something to be seen, and much to imagine. Here, more than in any other Latin American land, the layers of history are immediately revealed. First the immense fact of it, prodigal and strange: vast enough and rich enough to absorb the succeeding waves of Portuguese conquerors, African slaves, immigrants from Germany, Italy, Japan. Today a population of fifty-three million can suggest a false record of the facts, for three-quarters of the people are crowded within a hundred miles of the coast, mainly in the south-east. Here are the colossal cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, skyscrapered and growing every hour.