It is exactly thirty years ago that the first of the now famous Semaines Sociales de France was held in Lyons. Since then sessions—annual, except during the War—have been held of this perambulating Catholic University in all the regions of France: the twenty-sixth session was held this year in Nice (July 23 to 29). In 1932, at Lille, the theme treated was economic; last year, at Rheims, political; this year the official title of the subject was Social Order and Education. The title puzzled not a few, myself included: and it is only now that in retrospect I seem to grasp its full meaning. At Lille and Rheims the principles of economic and political science, as embodied in Catholic doctrine, had been admirably stated—principles, which have only to be applied, to end the economic and political anarchy of our age. But the anarchy continues; the principles are not applied. Why? Because our age does not know them; because an education is needed. It is only through education that we can move towards an ordered Society: Par I’éducation vers I’ordre social chrétien was in fact the title of the President’s inaugural address at Nice.

‘Christianity has been tried two thousand years and has failed,’ say our neo-pagans. No, we retort, it has never failed, whenever it has been tried: the trouble is, that it has so rarely been tried. Individually, yes, it has been and is being tried: but socially?

In our present state of spiritual emergency must some form of economic reconstruction precede spiritual revival? This issue is dividing Catholic opinion. On the one hand Mr. Eric Gill writes: ‘Instead of doing anything about economics the moralists fulminate against the unborn child .... As someone said: “The drains are smelling—let's have a day of intercession!”’ And again: ‘The clergy are barking up the wrong tree when from the altar steps they talk about sin to people who have been deprived of the possibility of living according to common natural morals.’ Then Father Drinkwater: ‘The economic problem fills the whole sky, nothing, nothing, nothing, can be done until that problem has been dealt with.’

On the other hand, M. Maritain supports Péguy, and holds that if the social revolution is to come at all it must also be moral. He would go even further: ‘One is condemned to a work primarily destructive, if one wished to change the face of the earth without first changing one’s own heart, and this no man can do by himself. It may well be that if an almighty love really changed our hearts, the external task would already be half accomplished.’

In supporting the latter opinion, I submit, therefore, that it is just as bad an error to over-emphasize the importance of economics as to under-rate it. Prevailing conditions of life can help or hinder, as both the moralist and psychiatrist never tire of reminding us—but how far?

In short, what we want is Catholic Revolution—a revolution transcending the revolt of petty anarchists but not ashamed of harnessing their energy and harmonizing their discordant outcry. Anyone acquainted with conditions in the U.S.S.R. will agree with me that with one fundamental obstruction removed no state could be easier and worthier of adoption. That is why we have spoken with some eagerness on the ‘unsponsored Bolshevism’ detached from administrative protection, and scandalized by the Capitalist-Communist symbiosis favoured by Stalin and Litvinoff. That one obstruction, I need hardly add, is the purely political value placed on the human economy. Nevertheless the transition from the political to the Metapolitic required for entente with Catholicism is not impossible. Long before the publication of M. Berdyaev’s works in England, contact with Bolshevism had convinced us of the subjectively religious nature of Russian Revolution—of the mock-metapolitic set before the Russian people, and the possibility of its substitution by Catholicism.

Are we warned by Austria? Less than a year ago we heard an Austrian Catholic declare that the prosperity of his country depended on an entente between moderate Radicalism and Catholicism in the temporal order, and co-operation in the national economy. For the Linz programme of the Socialists has much in common with the encyclicals of Pope Pius; both advocate a discreet State interference with unprincipled capitalism, both condemn huge profits. And Pfliegler, a left-wing Catholic, in condemning the incontinent greed and anarchical competition of modern Capitalism, in deploring the class war that these have made inevitable, does no more than endorse the Pastoral Letter of the Austrian Hierarchy.

Giacomo Tommaso Del Vio named Caietanus from his birthplace, Gaieta, died in the autumn of 1534. He had been a Cardinal for the last seventeen years, had been chosen as the Dominican Master General when he was only thirty-nine, and had been employed as Papal legate in Hungary and at the Imperial Diet. His influence upon church policy had been exercised through four pontificates; he had been the councillor of Julius II, the intimate of Leo X, had helped to achieve the election of Adrian VI and had been the minister of Clement VII in the last years of his reign. Much of his public life had been marked by the conventional felicity of that of a high curial official in Medicean Rome; a Neapolitan by birth, barely noble and quite without inherited influence he would seem to have been first marked for preferment by the favour of Duke Ludovico Sforza; he had come to the Roman court as a familiar of the Caraffa, had owed his Cardinalate to the almost personal friendship of Leo X and then slowly earning the confidence of Charles V he had gained the sometimes hesitant support of the Imperialist grouping in the sacred college.

Throughout he had possessed that recognition as a genius so valuable to a Renaissance statesman, for he had shared in precisely those qualities that the men of the Renaissance valued; a subtle sense of words, a fluent scholarship, distinction as a diplomatist due to a careful recognition of the realities of each situation, and a plastic memory, that favourite prodigy of the 16th century.

Is it He or is it she that most holds the eye, establishing a rhythm of the mind that moves between them? She moves after this night of bearing with the unbroken grace of girlhood. Unprostrate by what to the women of the world is heaviest labour she makes the little adjustments to smooth the harshness of the improvised cradle. Lightness she has, but she has decision also; for to no young mother has the talent of ministry come so readily as to her. It was for this she was made.

A bed from the clean fodder of domestic beasts receives the child. She is delighted to know now her baby is so wholly hers. The flesh she has dexterously cradled in the manger was formed in her under the shadowing of God the Holy Spirit by that same soul which in little vague movements now tentatively becomes expert in the hands. If she by the obvious movements of her ministry first takes the attention, it is herself, her very ministrations, that direct it further downward to the child. She is intent upon Him. He also upon her. The eyes which have not yet learned the little exercise of seeing give back in mirrors the movements of the mother. Palpably He is her son. By the living character of the features already marked in Him He is child of the house of David as is she.

This is her hour of possession. Prophecies crowding upon this moment, futurity weighing from it in its main sway keep the doors of the stable where Mary has given birth to her God.

Jose Maria Salaverrίa, the well-known publicist, writing some months back in the monarchist daily A.B.C., bitterly lamented the lack of tolerance and compromise which characterized Spain’s political life. The reason, he stated, was to be sought in the age-old problem .... what must Spain do to keep up with the march of ‘progress’?.... a problem that has perplexed the greatest minds of the Peninsula and yet remains unsolved. Two solutions have been offered, one the europeizaciόn of Joaquin Costa, a renunciation of the past, a purging of all traditional elements, the double lock on the tomb of the Cid; the other the traditionalism of men like Ramiro de Maeztu whose desire was for a regeneration of his country on the old lines. Here in a nutshell is the tragedy of modern Spain, the struggle of opposites. The modernists have wished the complete elimination of traditional elements as incompatible with ‘progress,’ the traditionalists have viewed innovations with mistrust and have desired to maintain the old Spain without any concession. Other nations, confronted with the same problem, reached a solution through a process of transition, but Spain maintains partisan intransigeance to an extent unknown elsewhere, rendering political life a question of all or nothing, a violent oscillation of the pendulum from extreme to extreme. Political fanaticism of the Right or the Left is equally at fault and breeds nothing but continual alarm, violent polemic, and fruitless struggle. That ‘sweet reasonableness’ which is the essence of democracy is completely lacking.

The present year marks two notable anniversaries associated with events which had wide spread importance, though very different results within the area of Law. The one was the publication of the famous Decretals of Gregory IX in 1234, a compilation of ecclesiastical law brought together by a Dominican friar, St. Raymund of Penafort, in the direction of centralization in Church government, which took its rise from the great Hildebrand, steadily but surely moved forward through the reigns of successive popes, and finally almost came to rest with Pope Gregory IX. Then there is that other most tragic event, three hundred years later, in 1534, the passing of the Act of Supremacy, whereby the death blow was struck at Canon Law, as far as England is concerned, and any lively influence that it might still have exerted on our own legal institutions was stifled at its source, though in shadowy forms it lingered on. But in the following year even the study of Canon Law was crushed out, when Cromwell as Henry VIII’s vicegerent visited the Universities and issued injunctions to the effect that lectures on the Decretals and the conferring of degrees in Canon Law should be abolished. The sequel was a notable depression also in the study of civil law in this country.

All but the prejudiced sectarian have come to acknowledge the Papacy as a wonderful piece of machinery and organization, not only within the sphere of religion and political prestige, but as a centre of law and government.

A necessity is defined as something that cannot not be; and in approaching Catholic Action study is a necessity. As a recent writer in Blackfriars expressed it: ‘The first stages of Catholic Action tend more to the study than to the street.’

The question which immediately suggests itself is whether there is adequate provision made for the Catholic layman to encourage and help him to ‘get down to’ this study. It is in the belief that there is not, and that some facilities should be forthcoming, that this scheme is suggested. But first let us be satisfied that not enough is being done. There exist two (National) societies for the purpose of promoting study, namely the Catholic Evidence Guild and the Catholic Social Guild. The avowed object of the former is to train apostolic men and women to expound the truths of the Faith from public platforms. This inevitably restricts their numbers, as but few are fitted for such work. The other society’s aim and object is the study and dissemination of Catholic social principles. In the manner of the Schools we feel that we must add a third—a society, or better (in view of Occam’s razor), some organization subject to the various diocesan Catholic Action Boards, whose object would be to provide classes in the fundamentals of the Catholic religion.

The scheme is best outlined under the divisions of the seven ‘circumstances’ of human action: