The purpose of this article is to give some idea of the way in which Catholics in Belgium are attempting to deal with one of the most influential forces of our time—the Cinema. Under the stimulus and direction of the Dominican Father Felix Morlion, they have evolved a method which is at once intelligent and eminently successful. In England very little has as yet been done; and this brief survey may be of interest to those who realise the importance and urgency of the problem.

The rise of the film to its present status of universal predominance is surely unique in its rapidity. Between 1887 and 1889 Edison invented a toy, the Kinetoscope; you looked through its peephole and saw a series of pictures of somebody who was moving, awkwardly moving, it was true, but moving. The toy became popular; but it had this limitation, only one person could peep at a time. This restriction inevitably provoked the idea of projecting the pictures on to a screen by means of some sort of magic lantern, thus making them visible to a roomful of people. The instrument was made, and the first Vitascope was shown on Broadway in 1895. It met with immediate success: the Cinema, as we know it, had begun.

In less than eighteen months Japan has lost two premiers, one from each of the two major political parties, to assassins’ bullets; a cabinet minister of high rank has perished in the same way; so has a leading industrialist. Baron Wawatsuki, ex-premier and leader of the Minseito, has had an attempt made on his life, other prominent men have been threatened. The victims, it will be noticed, are not confined to one political complexion, or to any one department of life. One might almost be excused for believing some malignant spirit to have suddenly seized on the country, but, demoniacal possession being nowadays hardly a tenable political theory, some other explanation must be sought for these crimes. It is not sufficient to put them down to the peculiar obliquity of mental vision which makes the Japanese condone assassination if patriotic motives are alleged in excuse. Political murder has not been uncommon in Japan; there have been cases before where misguided individuals have felt that their country’s good demanded the removal of a particular person, but they were the isolated acts of solitary fanatics. Here there is a series; an organized body, the ‘Blood Brotherhood,’ has been at work. We must, therefore, look deeper, and examine the unrest and ferment of which these acts are a manifestation.

Japan to-day is in a state of flux, largely as a result of the sudden impact of Western ideas on a society that was essentially static. Seventy years ago she was a feudal state, her society was one of fixed ranks and gradations, her economy was mainly agricultural, industry was still in the handicraft stage, the population was stationary.

Man is a vegetable, but something more; and so it would be a mistake to try to write his life in terms only of the gropings of a plant for nourishment. He is an animal, but something more; and so his activity cannot always be explained as an instinctive response to a particular situation and a search for sensuous satisfaction. His vegetable and animal functions may fill almost all his time and occupy the foreground of his attention. But it is the flickering moment of deliberation and the lurking moment of reason that chiefly engage our notice in any discussion of a specially human problem of conduct.

Such as contraception. Even so, the problem may be considered from various angles—medical, psychological, economic, political, historical, artistic. But ultimately the scientific discussion resolves itself into a question of philosophy. Anybody who has dipped into the literature of the subject will recall how quickly and how constantly the idea of right or wrong crops up. Most people, I suppose, in the face of a personal problem of conduct, apply the test of principles that attempt some sort of approximation to the fundamental nature and decencies of things. Other considerations have their place, but the last word on contraception belongs to that science which deals with human affairs at this depth.

This science is called ethics. Unfortunately, the word has come to suggest an arbitrary collection of prohibitions and grudging permissions, some rather stupid to our brave new world of scientific humanism, all rather galling.

The last few years have been marked by events which bring to light the new growth of the Church since she regained her liberty in countries in which she had suffered, first persecution, then suppression, and finally an obstinate, lingering prejudice, kept alive by a false tradition. Three years ago Catholics in England celebrated the centenary of their emancipation, and the few thousand Catholics of Sweden kept with great rejoicing the eleven hundredth anniversary of St. Ansgar’s coming to their shores with the gospel of peace, which Danes had celebrated three years earlier, at the same time commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the religious freedom granted to them by the Constitutional Law of 1849. With great fitness the day chosen for these festivities was August 1st, the feast of St. Peter’s Chains. Seven centuries after the coming of Ansgar, Denmark was torn away from the unity of the Church, and lost that contact with the world outside which had been like the freshness of the open sea and which she has only begun to regain in other ways during the last forty or fifty years. The doctrines of the Reformers came at a convenient time for the king and his ministers, and it was really by a coup d’etat that the new regime was established in 1539. After a generation or two very little was left of the old Faith; it was carefully and thoroughly stifled in the minds and hearts of the people, though it must not be forgotten that there was still so much love for what it had given them, that it could influence their lives.

Some people seem to thrust a disappointment aside, as one brushes mud from clothes; their attitude agrees with the saying that it is a poor coat that will not bear brushing, but it is possible that they never envisage the amount of brushing that a life-time calls for. Others can find a cynical satisfaction in disappointment: it affords support to pessimistic expectations, for one of the strangest possibilities of the human mind is to feel a disappointment that was halfexpected, and then to salvage a pleasure from contemplating bewrecked schemes. Such a hardness of the mind is a defensive armour of dangerous heaviness, and it may become the permanent covering of the spirit—a prison rather than a vesture.

Disappointments in a sequence accumulate a power of destruction which only a corresponding growth of resilience or a developing fortitude can counteract. Infinitely various are the means by which we evade or overcome the worst malignities of Fate. On the chessboard of life, whereon We range the black pieces of Despair and the white pieces of Hope, the most transparent cheating will satisfy us: White must win, of course. The first move is with Hope and the last also must be, or who would play this game? The calendar serves us well as a team umpire, though it can be a little stubborn soon after midsummer. Every twelvemonth the conventional division of time gives capital letters to a new year. This is as good as restoring the Queen to Hope; for what else is a New Year but to encourage Hope?

The condition of contemporary religious art is by no means satisfactory. Periodically the question is raised in the local Catholic Press and discussed from various angles and points of view; letters pour in defending or attacking a certain aspect of modern ecclesiastical art; for a time the correspondence waxes hot, then gradually fizzes out; and all remains as it was, to the apathetic indifference of the great majority of Catholics and the intense disgust of an artistically-minded minority.

It is the limit of presumption for one who is neither an artist, nor a writer, nor a thinker, to broach a subject which has been so ably and exhaustively discussed by competent authorities, therefore this paper is offered with apologies for what it is—the thoughts of an average lay-woman interested in art upon this acutely controversial matter.

It would seem that besides the too obvious truism that ‘a work of religious art has to be religious,’ some principle must form the basis of religious art. We imagine that M. Maritain (Quelques réfléxions sur l'Art Religieux. Art et Scolastique, p. 216) expresses this essential principle when he says:

Mediaeval frescoes and statues were the Bible of the illiterate, and their object was not only decorative but instructive.

We deplore the spread of communism as much as we disapprove of much of the inept propaganda which seeks to combat it. I do not refer to the patently discreditable propaganda associated with certain phases of Capitalism so much as to the ingenuous claptrap of respectable journals which, apart from the disrepute attaching to the quotation of doubtful statistics, sins solely by debility. I am not concerned with the advisability of the religious apologist’s carefully abstaining from polemic which may be too easily mistaken for partisan political thought; nor am I involved in anything beyond a thesis based on the urgent necessity of a mutual unobstructed apprehension on the part of Catholic and Communist—of a better understanding generally of two great world influences, Catholicism and Communism.

Slight as is his real appreciation of the Church, the educated Bolshevik has greater superficial knowledge of Catholicism than has the average Catholic of applied communism (a recent experiment from which he is geographically more or less remote) or of a communist theory which is buried in tomes of an abstruseness beyond his patience. To the Western mind in the mass the Bolshevik is a rather remarkable combination of two extreme opposites. He is represented as a combination of incredible cunning and fatuousness. His propaganda, we are told, is, in its astuteness, the first step to a communist diabolarchy; but we are left to infer that he is practically incapable of intellectual process, or, if he engages at all in dispute he is to be demolished by arguments that would discredit a school debating society.