In recent months there has been controversy in the Catholic press casting doubt on the expediency of the ‘reunion’ or ecumenical work taking place within the Church, and promoted by the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians at the Vatican Council. It is said to be drying up the normal inflow of conversions, because some potential converts are encouraged to stay where they are in order to work for eventual unity between the Church and their own dissident communion. It has been asserted, though the authority for this does not appear widely based, that in Germany, for this reason, there is a calculated refusal on the part of some priests to accept prospective converts for instruction and reception. Whatever the truth may be in this matter the question is certainly being asked by a number of priests and lay people in this country whether this new apostolate is not encouraging a kind of indifferentism, in the minds of Catholics, concerning the uniqueness of the one true Church as the way of salvation for all men and so hindering individual conversions.

The question came up for discussion at the Heythrop Conference and, as far as I know, the general conclusion reached was that the work of attracting, instructing and receiving individual converts, and the work of mutual penetration and understanding between ourselves and other Christians, which is the aim of ecumenical encounter, are specifically different from each other in technique and approach, but in the long run compatible because they are complementary. Catholic ecumenism is a preparation of the ground, on a wide and corporate scale, for a conversion to truth, which will ultimately lead by God’s grace to unity in faith.

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.

Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.

In a previous article I argued that the present Western nuclear deterrents are immoral because they involve their operators, if not the Western governments, in the intention to destroy normal cities. And if this is true, we must stop co-operating with the present deterrent policies and try to change them.

The most obvious alternative to these policies is unilateral nuclear disarmament; and some people believe that we should accept unilateral disarmament in any case because the deterrent will sooner or later break down into nuclear war. But many would say that the disastrous immediate consequences of unilateral disarmament would outweigh the remote risk of war which attaches to the nuclear deterrent. If unilateral disarmament is the only alternative to our present immoral defence policy then we should adopt it, no matter how dangerous it may be. But if unilateral action is dangerous, we should not advocate it until we are quite sure that there is no alternative to our present policy which is morally permissible and less dangerous. Many people, including Catholics, view the nuclear deterrent not as an active preparation for mass murder but simply as a means of avoiding the situation which would arise without it. If Russia alone had nuclear power, she could blackmail us into surrender; we must have nuclear power too, not because we want to attack Russia or because we envisage a Russian attack - there is indeed virtually no danger of war - but simply to prevent the possibility of convincing Russian blackmail. One may point out to Catholics who regard the deterrent in this way that however unlikely war is and however much we are keeping the present deterrent just to avoid the consequences of not having it, it does still require its operators to be on the alert to destroy normal cities at a moment’s notice.

The term ‘socialization’ in Mater et Magistra has given rise to some misunderstanding and the uses of the word can be profitably examined so that the particular sense it has in the encyclical may be better appreciated.

In general, one can distinguish several uses of the word: (i) its broader sense in Mater et Magistra; (2) a limited, economic sense used by French writers to signify the way in which property and the firm are no longer isolated but are interdependent; (3) it can be used in a positive sense as implying something morally desirable, the idea of an institution being made responsible to society so that it fulfils a task of service to the community; (4) it can be used in a variety of different ways connected with public ownership; (5) it can be used in an unfavourable sense particularly by Americans e.g. ‘socialization of agriculture’, used as another term for collectivization, or ‘socialized medicine’; (6) in sociology the term ‘socialization’ describes the way in which a child acquires habits and is ‘conditioned’ through its upbringing.

The suggestion that John XXIII in this section of the encyclical has in some way approved the welfare state should be dismissed (whether paragraph 136 gives any approval of the idea of the welfare state is a different matter). The section on socialization (paras 59 to 67) immediately follows the section on subsidiary function in which the Pope has emphasized the importance of a man’s right to be primarily responsible for his own upkeep and that of his family (para 55). The section on socialization makes no direct reference to industry so that socialization in the public ownership sense of the term is not intended.

The major moral problems to be tackled on film - seriously tackled, not exploited for commercial or publicity expedience - are, as might be expected, problems that affront the social conscience rather than the religious. And to those who frivolously take this to be a reflection on the immorality of the cinema, it might be useful to consider whether it is not rather a reflection on the lack of real charity among the conventionally religious. These major moral problems can be, I think, most easily explored under a few broad headings, though these are necessarily fluid and some films could as easily fit under any of three and some, perhaps, fit uneasily under any. I would suggest then, that it is convenient to survey them under the headings of war, justice, society and the individual, and what one might almost call ‘conscience and religion’ or perhaps more accurately ‘conscience and God’. There is even, I think, a faint embryonic shaping of a category which might almost be called ‘conscience and sex’, though most of the films I myself would put here could probably be just as well placed under the category of the ‘individual’, because the situation explored is nearly always conveyed in terms of limited personal relationships rather than in wider implications of the moral law as it is understood by classical theologians.

War. The theme of war in the cinema is, roughly speaking, treated in two quite different ways and it is important to realize this because it is, after all, one of the most constantly recurrent themes in the film output of nearly every nation that played an active part in the last war.