Whoever would write about a modern pope labours under serious handicaps. The public utterances of the popes are veiled by a conventional language that most effectually muffles their personality. In the action of the Roman See upon the universal Church during the time they are its bishop, it is not by any means easy to disentangle the part of the pope and the part of the high official whose trained mind is the papal instrument. Convention, again, seals the mouths of those who could speak about the personal reactions of the pope whether to the personalities who cross his path or to the crises of his reign. And once the pope is dead interest shifts rapidly to his successor. In the reign of that successor, in the press of business and of actuality that absorbs the high officials of the Curia from the moment of the new pope’s election, there is little leisure left for the composition of memoirs by those who really knew the pope who has died. The portrait of a pope has thus to be built up from scanty materials indeed, and the most promising of these, from the biographical artist’s point of view, are only too often sadly lacking in authenticity. If Pius XI had been a letter writer as industrious as Queen Victoria, if he had kept a diary, and if there were any chance of these documents seeing the light, then we might, some one might, at some future day, be in a position really to analyse his personality in the best French manner, and set his greatness before the world with the skill of a Gainsborough or a Goya. As it is . . .

When I received your Secretary’s invitation to address the Midland Catholic Medical Society, I was moved to accept by the fact that the very title of your Society showed that you expressly associate medicine and religion, or rather medicine and a particular outlook on religion; and I felt that, if it could be done without impertinence, it might be helpful to trace some of the consequences of such an association.

While you are medical men and women engaged in medicine, but so engaged with a definite theological and religious outlook, I would open my remarks by referring to the converse case of a theologian who approaches his theological work from a standpoint fixed towards science. At the time when your invitation reached me, I had just come across a passage in a Protestant theological work which I had had occasion to consult, in which the writer shows how certain of his convictions in the sphere of modern medical science have patently affected his theology. Discussing Christ’s reference to the possession of individuals by evil spirits, this theologian assumes that Christ was accepting beliefs now outworn, the general beliefs of His time in regard to demon-possession, that ‘in fact, in matters of human science, our Lord’s information did not extend beyond what a man, born and educated as He was, might naturally have acquired.’ The theologian has drawn that conclusion through his acceptance of modern medical views of disease. He is regarding Christ’s interpretation of the origin of particular types of disease as unsound on the assumption that the modern medical interpretation of such disease is sound. Granted that either Christ or modern medicine must be right, the theologian whom I am quoting comes down on the side of modern medicine. Now I assume that Catholics would conclude, on the contrary, that if one of these two must be wrong, then modern medicine must be that one.

To ensure a full understanding of the situation to which the publication of the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine has given rise, it must be viewed against the background of Anglican history. The upheaval of the Reformation tore the Church of England violently out of the living tradition of Latin Catholicism, but it did not place it completely in either of the main streams of continental Protestantism. From the moment of its final separation, it stood in isolation—with a heritage from the Catholic past, and a considerable infiltration of contemporary Protestantism. It appealed, not as did Catholicism, to a living voice, nor to a great interpreter of God’s revelation, as did Calvinism and Lutheranism, but to the primitive Church of the early centuries. Thus, while Catholicism invoked a living continuous tradition as final witness to the faith, and Protestantism, tending to ignore the interval between the Apostles and its own second founders, presented a new interpretation, Anglicanism, rejecting both, based itself upon an appeal to the earliest ages of Christianity, and created a tradition orthodox, sacramental, sober and learned, biblical, patristic and historical in approach, but dogmatic only where the primitive Church seemed plainly to have given its decision. Scholasticism, with its tradition of close theological thinking, was set aside, and so in the main were the systems of the continental reformers, and thus grew into being the characteristics of the Anglican ethos.

Liturgy may too easily be thought to include nothing more than a somewhat archaic formula of public and official worship in the Church confined to the Mass and the Office of the day. It is true that these latter constitute the essence or core of the liturgy; but if we care to probe deeper than a mere study of chant and formulae and rubrics will take us, we discover beneath these a spirit emanating organically from the fundamental doctrines of the Church and the more primitive outlook of Christians upon life as a whole. The liturgical rites and ceremonies we now know did not spring from an early and undisciplined urge to worship such as is common in all primitive peoples. Though based upon this universal instinct, they were evolved through well-defined motives for worshipping in a particular way the personal God Whom divine revelation had made known to them with certitude and much understanding. The liturgy as we have it came into being gradually as the expression of a desire at once human, being based on a specifically human urge to worship, and at the same time intensely Christian, being the development and perfecting of that urge by the light of Faith and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost coupled with the human rendering of divine truth in the Incarnation. Thus the liturgy was the direct expression of the Christian mind, somewhat as the music of Grieg was, within a much narrower compass, an expression of the Norse mind and the literature of Shakespeare of the English mind. We might add that in the same way the very absence of effective liturgy is an expression of the Nonconformist ethos and the plain table and severe interior of the Scottish kirk the reflection of the Puritan attitude to life.

In the history of the Church there are many examples of the Faith ‘persecuted in one city fleeing to another’ and eventually finding its way back from the second to the first. The Faith may be sent by one country to another and lost in the sender and sent back by the receiver. A remarkable example of this is the history of the conversion of the British Isles and their subsequent sending of missionaries into Europe.

In South Africa it is heard that when the Apostolic Delegate visited the late Holy Father last year, the Supreme Pontiff, the undying Peter, of whom Newman wrote that ‘in the history of the ages his words have been facts and his commands prophecies,’ said to his representative that the foreign missions represented now his chief hope for Christendom in view of the present outlook in Europe.

And the Church has an inarticulate as well as an articulate voice. It is not without significance that the Foreign Missionary Orders are now overflowing with vocations. Both Voices represent the Infallible Spirit, which may well be stirring the Church to develop rapidly elsewhere before the work of the new vandals be done—if it is to be done. It may be that the trusteeship of the Kingdom of God will pass to other races than the white, at least in part.

Among the various Missions in South Africa at the moment there is one, recognised as one of the most prospering in the world, which suggests very strongly the hope of a new way round. While, to leave violence out of our calculations, it can be said at least that problems and prejudices in Europe are too mixed to allow of any very rapid evangelisation without quite extraordinary miracles, the Basuto people in South Africa are giving an example of mass conversion to the Faith recalling that of first evangelisation of Ireland, the most peaceful and triumphal in history.

Possibly the above title might be considered somewhat of a misnomer, for the particular Co-operative Movement I have in mind, although inaugurated in comparatively recent years, is already far past the experimental stage. I refer to the St. Francis Xavier Co-operative Movement, in the Province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Its story reads like a veritable romance, but underneath it all it is easily seen that one of the chief factors at work has been unremitting toil and service on the part of its sponsors, for those less fortunately placed.

A few weeks before he passed away, the late Sir Arthur Currie, Principal of McGill University, Montreal, defining the role of the modern university in what he well described as ‘the desperate battle of modern life,’ said: ‘The University of to-day must not be content to be a mere reservoir of knowledge, a storehouse of equipment, a base of supplies. Rather it must be a creator of forces for moulding human lives.’

The St. Xavier University, a Catholic centre of learning, in the eastern part of Nova Scotia, has in these late years been making a determined effort to do this very thing, and what is more, is succeeding. Unwilling to go on turning out graduates to seek, but not always to find, a place in the world, St. Francis Xavier has taken upon itself the task of endeavouring to lay more solid and stable economic foundations in this particular part of Canada. In other words, these university leaders are fashioning a new life-pattern for Nova Scotia.