Writing in the issues of this review for July 1944 and April 1945, I tried to explain the extremely complex set-up of peoples and Christian allegiances in the borderland that stretches from Lithuania to the Carpathians: that territory which was part of Poland-Lithuania from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, was partitioned between Russia and Austria in 1795, became Polish again from 1921 to 1939, and is now incorporated in the U.S.S.R. The inhabitants of the southernmost part, eastern Galicia (Galych, Halicz), are about one-third Latin Catholic Poles to three-fifths Ruthenians, i.e., Byzantine Catholic Ukrainians; and of these last I wrote that it seemed likely, in view of the circumstances and of historical precedent, that the Soviet authorities would seek to force them into the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually that process had already begun: in April 1945 all the Galician Ukrainian bishops were arrested and deported into Russia, and in March 1946 a handful of lower clergy and laity, calling themselves ‘The Synod of the Uniate Church in the Western Ukraine', reported to Marshal Stalin that the 350-year old reunion with Rome was revoked. It can hardly be doubted that the signal for this move was the death on the preceding November 1st of the archbishop of Lvov, Andrew Szepticky, who had not only been for forty-four years head of the Catholic Ukrainian church but for long the most respected and most loved of all Ukrainian public figures anywhere.

There are at present two main parties among the Russian Orthodox emigrés. Some of them are in communion with the Patriarch of Moscow and accept his jurisdiction, while the rest stand aloof. The latter are suspicious of the apparently close connection between the Patriarch and the atheistic Soviet Government. The former are impelled by a sort of spiritual patriotism to give their allegiance to the Church of their homeland, no matter what its relations with the Kremlin. Either decision has often been taken only after much prayer and searching of the heart, and may have caused much bitterness.

A number of those who have submitted to the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow have been allowed to visit the Soviet Union on business connected with the administration of the emigre churches. After staying for periods varying from a few weeks to several months, they have returned to take up again their normal work in France or Belgium. Some of them are priests, others laymen. Most of them have been born in Russia but have lived since the Revolution in Western European cities, which makes their description of the conditions among Christians in the Soviet Union all the more interesting. Most of them are still much attached to their homeland and are very proud of the victories which Russia won during the war, though this does not entail approval of all that the present Russian Government says and does. They are pleased to be able to demonstrate their solidarity with their people.

On April 4th, 1946, Paul Claudel was elected a member of the French Academy by 24 votes out of 25, the 25th being an abstention. The recognition was tardy, for he was in his 78th year; and in reversing the resounding rejection of 1935 the Academy was only ratifying the place he occupies as one of the foremost modern poets, and the greatest modern Catholic poet.

It is opportune to analyse his poetic theory.

Not indeed that the hostility shown to Claudel in 1935 was mainly for literary reasons. These existed, certainly: a deliberate departure from accepted rule and custom, an apparently lawless technique and a degree of obscurity that seemed to flout the reader, a most personal choice of subjects and use of words as well as disconcerting syntax, transitions, sudden changes of tone, mingling of the loftiest with the most colloquial language. His poetic system, wrote a critic of the time, ‘goes counter to all the advances laboriously realised since Ronsard and even Villon’. But there was also the strongest opposition on political and personal grounds: it is painful for example to read the virulent article in which Léon Daudet (Action Française, 3 Avril 1935), exults over Claudel’s defeat, having first recorded his own early admiration for the poet.

Claudel though an official was no politician. His consular and diplomatic career was a step-by-step achievement of steady work. He contrasts himself in this respect with Mallarmé the professor-poet, who hated his teaching and never crossed the Pont de l’Eveque ‘without feeling inclined to throw himself over the parapet’.

The Thomist Society of St Nicholas of Caen was begun in May, 1942, because some women students at the university in that town wanted to have a religious education on the same level as their intellectual training. They therefore decided to become disciples of St Thomas Aquinas, seeing that the Church names him as the surest master and guide.

The intention (and indeed the result) of the first lectures was to introduce the students to St Thomas’s thought and principal theses, and to stimulate them to do more than merely consult him, in fact to go right into his monumental Summa Theologica and live in contact with his spirit and teaching.

Seeing for themselves how capable St Thomas was of bringing them to the knowledge of God and giving them the basic principles of their own lives, they opened the Summa and studied it over a period of two years, 1943-45. This work was directed by Père Fauvergue, the Dominican Prior at Le Havre. They took the first eleven questions of the Prima Pars, studying them article by article—God, his existence, his nature—and they were filled with admiration for a teaching so wonderful in itself and so exactly suited to their needs.