The most recent pronouncement of the Holy See on the Ecumenical Movement is the Instruction of the Holy Office to Local Ordinaries of December 20, 1949. By its provisions Catholic ecumenical work, described in it as ‘reunion’ work, is safeguarded by cautionary measures and put under the direct supervision of the bishops, who are urged to give it prudent encouragement and direction, as a work which ‘should daily assume a more significant place within the Church’s pastoral care’. They are to appoint suitable priests, in each diocese, to make a special study of the movement and everything connected with it.

If any priest is contemplating the task laid upon him as a result of this directive, he cannot do better than make A History of the Ecumenical Movement the basis and starting point of his studies; a massively conceived and well planned volume of some eight hundred pages, written by fifteen experts in their respective subjects. Hardly an idea, event or person of ecumenical importance lacks at least a reference in these pages, and the full bibliography will give sufficient aid in following out a more complete study.

The volume falls into two distinct parts. The first comprises a history, from the Reformation onwards, of efforts by ecumenically minded persons to bring about the healing of schisms within Christendom. The second deals with the Ecumenical Movement proper; an organized movement expressing itself in World Conferences and culminating in the formation of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948.

All religious orders, however much they may vary in their origins or in the work they do, are based on a single— indeed a simple—idea: namely the search for Christian perfection. To begin with, this meant an individual’s going apart, often into the desert or a cave, where he might devote himself wholly to prayer and contemplation. The very word ‘monk’ means a solitary. But in the fourth century in Egypt the monks began to organize themselves in communities: the movement spread, and gradually a rule of life developed by which the communities were bound. The most important of them was that of St Benedict, bom in 480 in Italy, and the Benedictine rule became the dominant force in the growth of monastic life in the West.

The Rule of St Benedict, which is still followed today by the thousands of monks and nuns who bear his name throughout the world, is a sane and moderate document which provides a charter for a life to be lived in common. Its motto is ‘Pax’, the peace that comes to those who follow Christ. For it is, in St Benedict’s words, ‘a school of the Lord’s service’, in which the monk is to leam to prefer the common good to his own interests, and that common good is seen in the faithful following of Christ. The Abbot is Christ to his community, and the monk’s principal work is the Opus Dei: the work of celebrating the solemn liturgy, the praise and glory which it is man’s chief privilege to offer to God. Manual work is to be the monk’s other occupation, and the ordinary business of tilling the fields and running a house is seen to be itself a means of serving God in silence and simplicity. Labour itself is made into something holy.

When Parliament passed the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act in 1948, it acted on the belief that monopolies were capable of harming the public interest, although they did not necessarily do so. It provided for the establishment of a Commission which would, at the request of the Board of Trade, investigate the behaviour of particular monopolies, and would report whether or not these monopolies were behaving in an anti-social manner. If they were acting contrary to the public interest the Government might make an Order requiring the monopoly to amend its behaviour, although in the majority of cases it has, in fact, chosen to rely upon reaching an informal agreement with the monopoly. The Monopolies Commission has completed eleven such investigations, and the Government has already acted upon most of the Commission’s reports. About the middle of 1955 the Commission completed its first report on a ‘general reference’. In the case of such a reference the Commission was required to consider the general effect, over the whole of industry, of specified restrictive practices. The Act made no provision for Government action on such a report, which would therefore have no effect unless industry voluntarily amended its practices in the light of the Commission’s judgments, or unless the Government made the report the basis of new legislation. The Government has now introduced a Bill to deal with the practices covered in this report.

There is a sarcastic German saying of which I am often reminded when reading certain German books: ‘Why do it simply, if it is also possible to make it complicated?’ Dr Urs von Balthasar, the distinguished thinker, who has unfortunately already complicated the simplest of saints, St Teresa of Lisieux, now does the same for another modern Carmelite, Elizabeth of the Trinity; and his friend, Adrienne von Speyr, even succeeds in giving us a book of highly involved and not a little pretentious meditations on our Lady. There is no doubt that we are in need of thoroughly theological and unsentimental treatment of ‘devotional’ subjects, and both these books supply this. But they are unhappily vitiated by this deadly tendency to read non-existent profundities into the most normal events and attitudes, and to bandy about concepts of Kierkegaardian ‘dread’ and existentialist ‘vertigo’ where they have no meaning whatever.

Dr Balthasar’s book has been ‘translated and adapted’, and this means presumably that some of his more recondite observations have been cut out, which is all to the good. But unfortunately the translator, A. V. Littledale, has kept far too close to the author’s highly idiosyncratic style and frequently reproduces even his word order and his substantival adjectives and verbs, an inadmissible procedure that makes the reading of the book unnecessarily exhausting. To give but a few examples of this ‘translation-English’: ‘The man of faith lives from the standpoint of his eternal election by God.’ (p. 27). ‘Faith ... is the making present to the mind of our origin and end . . .’ (p. 28). ‘Her perception that the execution of the Father’s eternal plan is the work of the Holy Spirit, is the angle from which Elizabeth came to view the whole of revelation; her perspective directs itself primarily to the Spirit.’ (p. 107.)