A Cultured priest of my acquaintance has remarked to me more than onee that the penny Catechism, with all its virtues, is out of date. Many of its precise definitions and carefully chosen texts are aimed at a Bible Protestantism which hardly anyone believes in. On the other hand, difficulties which the modem convert is apt to raise are not met, and the standard ‘companions’ to the Catechism do not always-help. Similar objections apply, I believe, to a great deal of recent apologetic writing. Brilliant and compelling as it can be—I am thinking of books like The Everlasting Man—it frequently fails in two respects. First, it often does not carry the battle on to the ground where the modern intelligentsia choose to fight. This was the Complaint made by Professor Haldane against Mr Arnold Lunn, and the same could have been said, perhaps with more justice, in a number of other controversies. Secondly, an apologist labours under the immense handicap that whereas he is inside the Church, most of the people to whom his work is addressed are outside—and not only outside the Church, but outside what is popularly called Christianity. It is a testimony to Catholicism that it transforms one’s thinking even when it does not transform one’s life; but the difference must be paid for. Catholic spokesmen suffer from being Catholic. They try to communicate a vision which can only be had from within, and this is the business of the artist, not the apologist.

The economic crisis with which Britain is faced today has very little to do either with Tory Misrule before the war or with Socialist Mismanagement since. It is to some extent due to the loss of most of our overseas investments during the war; but it is mainly due to the fact that we are finding it more and more difficult to export our manufactures in exchange for food and raw materials. More than a hundred years ago Disraeli declared that ‘the continent will not suffer England to become the workshop of the world’, and he was right in spite of the fact that during the latter part of the nineteenth century we grew wealthy by exporting our manufactures in exchange for cheap food. The situation today is very different. The rest of the world is becoming more and more industrialised and the world is short of food. The ruthless exploitation of virgin forests and farmlands has resulted in erosion in five continents so that yields are going down and land is passing out of cultivation. At the same time populations are increasing and there is somewhat greater equality of income so that the effective demand for food is increasing. The result is that the terms of trade are moving against us. We are having and shall have to pay more in manufactures for what food we cannot produce at home and for the raw materials we need to keep our factories going.

In a recent number of Blackfriars (July, 1949) Dr A. W. Gledhill has discussed very competently some aspects of the statistical method as used in modern physics. He has tried to show there ‘that modern physical theory does not contradict the principle of causality’. Having made a study of this subject over quite a number of years, the writer, while agreeing with some of Dr Gledhill’s conclusions, feels nevertheless that there are a few points which have not been covered as adequately as the importance of the subject for modern philosophy seems to warrant.

In order to understand the controversy about the validity or non-validity of the principle of causality, which has been initiated by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is necessary to realise, first of all, that when a physicist speaks about causality, he usually does not mean the same thing as a scholastic philosopher. In scholastic philosophy one distinguishes different kinds of causes, such as the material, the efficient, the final, as well as the formal and exemplary causes. The classical physicist, on the other hand, since the time of Galileo, admits only efficient causes. Let us therefore give a brief sketch of the development of this concept of scientific causality and show the reasons for this limitation.

The purpose of a scientific theory is the prediction of events among the natural objects which form the field of enquiry of the particular science concerned. Evidently, the more certain the prediction, the better the theory on which it is based.

Generally speaking, we may say that it is the conviction of the ordinary people of Poland that no country has been more entirely Christian from the beginning than their own. Our Lord was born in Poland, they might say, in the midst of a snowy winter and in a thatched cottage such as we still see today, and resembling those found in Ireland, in some isolated place in a distant forest. Although there are caves in certain rocky and mountainous regions in Poland, nevertheless they are remote from the; daily life of the majority of the people, and so scattered as to pass unnoticed. Moreover these caves have horrible stories attached to them. Either they are the more or less magical property of the devil who hides in them treasures of uncertain origin, or else they were used by the notorious brigands of the Tatras Mountains who have such a romantic history.

So then the infant Christ came into the world in the heart of the Polish winter and in a thatched cottage or perhaps under the tumbledown roof of a barn or in the stable of some poor peasant Szopka, a classical word meaning ‘Christmas Crib’ or a marionet theatre proper to the Christmas season, comes from szopa, a stall. The word seems to be connected with the French échoppe—like the word ‘shop’ in English for the pronunciation is the same, ‘sz’ being pronounced like ‘sh’. At any rate, in the Quo Vadis of Sienkiewicz, the giant Ursus in speaking of Christ ejaculated: ‘Oh, if only our people had been at Golgotha, they would have soon rescued the Son of God!’ Now we know that Ursus and Lydia, although unmistakeably borrowed from English tradition, represent the people of Poland.

The National Gallery has recently exhibited some of its earlier Italian paintings that have been inaccessible since the outbreak of war. Amongst these are two works, both by anonymous artists of the Florentine Quattrocento and members of the school of Angelico. One represents the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ and the other tells the story of our Lady conferring the habit of the Order of Preachers on Reginald. Although not of the highest artistic endeavour they offer a commentary on the aesthetic position of the great Dominican painter. Exhibiting a difference that is significant, they bring out very clearly the divergent aspects of the master’s style. Unquestionably the demands of the two subjects are not identical; even so the treatment accorded to the latter is more directly in conformity with the affinity that Fra Angelico showed with earlier traditions, and the painter of the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ displayed a greater sympathy with the new naturalistic trends although they were still in an experimental stage.

The composition of the legend of Reginald is notable for its simplicity and the absence of ornamentation. The picture is divided into two main groups by the device of placing a pole a little to the right of the centre of the composition, but it might be more accurately described as being subdivided into three areas. This division of the picture into several distinct masses owes a certain amount to the system employed by Fra Angelico’s master, the Camaldolese monk, Dom Lorenzo Monaco, as can be seen in the painting of ‘Legends from the Life of Saint Benedict’ which hangs in the same gallery.