In recent times no Catholic subject has attracted such widespread attention as the affair of the priest-workers in France. The various phases of the negotiations between the French Hierarchy and the Vatican were widely reported in the English press; in one week the matter was discussed in a leader in the Manchester Guardian, in an article in the New Statesman and in a talk on the Third Programme. Some commentators seemed to see in it an attempt by the Church in France to revolt against the dominance of the Vatican, on the principle that if you scratch a French bishop you find a Gallican; others seemed to feel that the episode revealed the Church (in France as elsewhere) in its true colours as anti-worker; others yet again insinuated that a halt had to be called to the desertions that were taking place from the ranks of the priest-workers to the Communists. Yet to appreciate the recent decisions of the French bishops, the priest-workers must be seen in the context of the whole problem of the Church and the workers in France, and of the worker apostolate which existed long before the experiment of the priest-workers was begun. In other words, the directives issued by the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops to the leaders of worker Catholic Action in October are as significant as the new instructions regarding the position of priest-workers.

The picture is falsified unless the priest-worker is seen as part of the whole worker apostolate and that against the background of the growth of social Catholicism in France.

Since the later middle ages the Church has commonly taught that five main conditions must be fulfilled before a war may be entered into with justice and therefore graciously. These conditions are that the war has to be undertaken only as a last resort when all other methods of retaining or achieving peace have failed; that there are serious prospects of success; that the war must be waged only for a grave and just cause proportionate to the evils of war; that it must be declared and prosecuted only by the legitimate authority; and that the whole prosecution of the war be guided by the right intention. There is no need to discuss this tradition; it is sufficiently well-known and in certain circles has been discussed at such length as to become wholly complex and unreal. What is urgently needed is an objective view of the application of the principles involved in this tradition to the modem scene of international strife; in other words, we need to discover the full stream of Christian life and thought as it meets the ocean of the present at this point.

Tradition teaches—and we will accept it without argument— that war may be undertaken only as the last resort. As things exist today we can say that if and when a country suffers armed aggression and she is forced into a defensive war, then war is permissible under this heading because there is no alternative; but that international politics are so complicated that it is often extremely difficult to discover who is the real aggressor.

Latin America accounts for more than a third of the world’s Catholic population but for less than nine per cent of the world’s priests. The disproportion between these figures is the cardinal factor in the religious situation of a vast area almost wholly Catholic in nominal allegiance but which today presents one of the most urgent of the Church’s missionary problems.

The evidence of statistics is never the whole of any story, but the facts are so grave and their significance so little appreciated that this weakening of the Church’s essential function in South America must be further illustrated. It is usually assumed that a proportion of one priest to a thousand faithful is the barest minimum for assuring the Church’s basic ministrations. (In countries predominantly Protestant the ratio is much higher. Thus England and Wales have a proportion of one priest to about 450, the United States one to 622.) For the whole of Latin America the proportion is one to 7,000, with considerable variations in the different republics. (In Chile it is one to 3,000; in Argentina one to 4,750; in Brazil one to 8,000; in Honduras one to 10,350; in Guatemala one to 28,000.) The effective ministry of the priests there are (and in most countries many are in any case old) is hindered above all by the brute facts of geography. Thus in Venezuela a population of 4,500,000 is served by 800 priests, of whom 160 are at work in the diocese of Caracas alone. The remaining 640 are dispersed through a territory six times the size of France.

A Poem provides an enclosed domain for investigation, challenging the critic to discover how it is constructed, how its formal structure is related to the complex effect it gives, how metrical means are related to poetic ends. Although kinship of form provides the critic with a positive basis for comparison in the treatment of different poems, the emphasis seems now to have shifted from the study of a poem’s shared and inherited qualities to the study of what is distinctive or typical of the age in which it is written; as a result, little attention is paid to the diversity of poetic forms—distinct, vital and active in themselves—working in the minds of many different poets independently, towards the same kind of poetic result.

Yet the fixed poetic forms and prescribed measures have a sort of philosophic beauty of their own. The poet must commit his feelings to their determination within some chosen form. The nature of his material sets a problem to be solved, and the solution is the poetic ordering of that material: he will, therefore, imagine each effect in relation to the technical means necessary for its accomplishment, by so distributing his rhymes, for example, that the emphasis derived from rhyme in one part is exactly neutralized by a similar concentration upon another.

The subject-matter of a poem exercises a remote control over the poet’s choice of words, and its form an immediate control, the metrical scheme tightening the interpretation of the grammar. Words have certain degrees of elevation in the scale of language.