In a book called Vatican Assignment, which is shortly to be published, I give an account, from some years of experience in Rome, of the establishment in 1914 and subsequent development of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the Holy See. I also deal with several other related topics, social and political, such as American diplomatic relations during the nineteenth century, where I show that the American Government—then aloof from European politics—did not have to contend with the difficulties and prejudices which affected Great Britain during that period. The present article will be limited to giving a brief account of the most interesting attempts that were made, after the Reformation and before 1914, to bring about diplomatic contact, official or not, between Great Britain and the Vatican. In the space available it can be no more than an outline, but there is a mass of fascinating material available, must of it unused, some of it known only to specialist researchers, and I hope to be able to fill in the details in the fairly near future.

Most British and American visitors to Rome will be familiar with the church of San Gregorio, from the steps of which the Pope sent St Augustine to England on his mission in 596 A.D. In the forecourt of this church is the memorial tablet to Sir Edward Came, last British diplomatic envoy to the Holy See before relations were severed in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Thereafter, until James If's unhappy experience, the laws prohibiting foreign jurisdiction in either Church or state and establishing the Royal Supremacy in religion made illegal any link between London and Rome.

In our January number we published an article on religious translation. One of our readers, the Rev. J. B. O’Connell, who has himself collaborated in a fairly recent translation of the missal, asked the writer of the article to provide some examples which would embody the principles of translation he had formulated. This seemed a very just request, and so we are printing here four pieces of translation, two from the breviary and two from the missal. The extracts from St Leo and St Augustine were chosen for the contrast of style. These two, and the translation of the prayers from the missal, are by Fr E. Hill, O.P., the writer of the aforementioned article; the translation of the Consecration Prayer is by Fr H. McCabe, O.P. It will be observed that there are some small points on which they differ, for example on the use of ‘thou’ or ‘you’ in formal prayers to God. They would both welcome the comments and criticisms of readers.

Pilate’s guilt was certainly surpassed by the wickedness of the Jews, who made use of Caesar’s name to overawe him, and so drove him to carry out their villainy. Yet he did not come out of it guiltless either, since he forsook his own judgment and lent himself to other men’s wrongdoing. But that Pilate allowed Jesus to be ignominiously ridiculed and maltreated, that he had him flogged and crowned with thorns and dressed up in the trappings of mock grandeur, and then paraded him in such state before the gaze of his persecutors; all this he reckoned might soften the animosity of his foes and glut their hatred; it might perhaps make them think that there was no point in persecuting any further a man whom they saw so variously misused.

Rembrandt’s art reveals a unique reverence and appetite for life which originated in an entirely different attitude and vision from the extrovert thirst for sensual excitement animating the tavern scenes by Jan Steen and other Dutch painters. Rather he evinced an insatiable curiosity about reality, about matter informed by spirit, and if he depicted genre scenes they indicated a pervasive intangible quality beyond the facts of their immediate physical appearance. The acuteness of his observation enabled him to translate the most complicated forms and structures—struggling children, wild beasts, carriages—into drawings where their particular essentials are seized with an inimitable assurance and spontaneity: a single calligraphic curve defines the receding plane of an upturned nose, a bold prolonged oval stroke the thrust and fulness of an abdomen. Like Constable he was an intuitive rather than a scientific draughtsman: that his results are objectively convincing is a triumph of optical and manual coordination.

However, it is not mere technical virtuosity which provides the key to his perennial fascination. His oeuvre represents a continual and gradual elimination of superfluities in an unending quest for visual equivalents of the fundamental mystery which lies at the heart of all human experience. Contrary to the usual pattern of responsiveness, his sense of wonder increased with age, and compassionate wonder became the ultimate theme of his art, culminating in the painting of the ‘Prodigal Son’ with its universal and personal hope of Divine mercy.

On September 23, the annual Peace Prize awarded by the German Book Trade will be presented to Reinhold Schneider at St Paul’s Church in Frankfort on the Main. This prize was founded in 1949/50, and has been given every year to an author of any nationality or religion who by his life and work has contributed to the future peace of the world. Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse and Carl J. Burckhardt were previous prizewinners. Anyone who knows Reinhold Schneider’s life and work would agree that he deserves the award as fully as his predecessors.

On May 13 of this year Schneider kept his fifty-third birthday; it is also the birthday of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, one of his favourite historical characters. He was born in Baden- Baden of a Protestant father from the Erzgebirge, and of a Catholic mother from the shores of Lake Constance, he himself being baptized in the Catholic Church.

According to a short sketch in his book Erbe im Feuer (‘Heritage in the Fire’), his childhood was a happy one, although rarely can parents in the twentieth century have shown so little understanding of their son’s vocation and gifts as Reinhold Schneider’s father and mother. Schneider senior was an extremely taciturn man: father and son rarely spoke to one another. When he died rather young of an incurable disease, the author’s mother married a Catholic physician in Baden-Baden with whom Schneider’s relations, although good, have again not been based on any profound understanding on the elder man’s part.

The name Ananda Coomeraswamy conjures for me folk-weave ties, strange theories of social credit, and Ruskin-Morris sympathies. Before now he has been labelled a crank—and I think that there is some truth in the charge. By the same coin, Eric Gill has also been called a crank. Yet, now that their work can be seen in retrospect, a fair degree of modification is necessary.

There is a type of Englishman or American, as there is a type of Indian, who while remaining loyal patriots find that both patriotism is not enough and that their countries can only be best served (or saved) by the most vigilant eye of criticism. Both Gill and Coomeraswamy, who equally admired each other, were opposed to many of the trends which they saw in England America and India. They disapproved of the growing power of technology and yet it was largely because of technology (as it had come to affect printing) that their opposition to it could be disseminated and published so widely. That is the paradox.

Coomeraswamy’s father was the first Hindu to be called to the bar in London; his wife was an Englishwoman. When her husband died she left Colombo in 1879, taking with her a young boy of two. It was not until twenty-five years later that her son returned to his native land.