Early in August this year a party of 24 men set out from Bishop’s Stortford carrying a great wooden cross to Walsingham. The distance to be covered was a little more than a hundred miles; the return journey by another route was another hundred. The country between is not very populous; Catholics are extremely few, living scattered in isolated parishes. This was the first fulfilment of a hope expressed in these pages a year ago in an article describing a similar pilgrimage to Vézelay. On that occasion a British party, widely representative, carried a cross from Dieppe, one of fourteen to be set up at Vézelay in an international congress of peace. The congress itself was disappointing, but on the road there was born in the hearts of the pilgrims a new inspiration; they discovered in the following of the cross such an enrichment of life in Christ, such possibilities of apostolate, that they determined to do all they could to introduce the idea into their own country. The pilgrimage was the thing. They set up a committee to pursue this ideal.

Such an undertaking obviously lends itself to misconception. It might be taken to be, it might become, a stunt. More easily still, it might be mistaken for a romantic, rather futile gesture, the nostalgic revival of an old Christian practice. Why, after all, in these days of modern transport, walk to your shrines? Is it not medieval mummery, escaping the hard actualities of the present?

The temporal and moral chaos, so uniformly evident in the world today, gives clear and undeniable proof of the necessity of moral standards external to, and therefore independent of, the caprice of man. This chaos, of which only the material results are brought home to us with adequate reality, is the direct and unavoidable result of the acceptance of the theory that man is capable of legislating for himself in the moral sphere. Indeed, the deepest of truths is expressed in the oft-quoted statement that the most cogent proof of the divine origin of and the necessity of mankind for the ten commandments is given by the results which follow their being cast aside. In like manner some external, ultimate and unchangeable standards are necessary in the fields of economics and politics, sciences which of their essence have reference to man in relation to his fellows and to the physical world. These must be ultimate and unchangeable because, in his physical nature, man has unchanging fundamental needs; external, because it is by its success or failure in satisfying these very needs and not those invented by the fickle desires of the individual that any political or economic system must be judged. By what standards are we to measure such a system, what gauge are we to apply to its propositions in order that our appreciation of it may be true and our judgment just?

Weathervanes are like historians—not always infallible: whilst often they will register a change of breeze, they will repeatedly fail to detect approaching storms. Moreover although this generalisation is true, the word ‘historian’ is used advisedly: for on the one hand, there are those who colour their deductions with their own political outlook and, on the other hand, those who examine the past with what amounts to the prophetic eye in reverse. At the moment, German history is suffering from a spate of articles, pamphlets and, in some cases, books that belong to the partisan class of writer of the first group, and on no particular body has this ill-fortune acted so much as a stigma as upon the German Catholic Church.

These writers confronted with a subject such as the French Revolution seldom go beyond statistical fact: their income is largely dependent upon shoddy text-books pressed upon the young who, now considered no longer able to digest rows of figures, are treated to the same facts presented by isotype tables. That one of the principal reasons for the Revolution was because French and English philosophy had reached its acme as a science of materialism is not mentioned : still less is it hinted that the counter-blast to this materialism came from Germany.

Almost anything that one may say about the situation in Germany today is trite and commonplace. It has all been said a thousand times already, and everyone would seem to be quite well aware of what is happening. Certainly many people have by now heard most of the facts; yet comparatively few seem to realise what they mean for Germany. Somewhere at the bottom of this gap in our minds there is the very understandable view that we have enough worries to deal with in our own country at present, and that we cannot spend ourselves wholeheartedly in trying to solve Germany’s difficulties; ‘Who won the war anyway?’ Then of course the older generations have seen all this before; ‘We became too sentimental after the 1914-18 war’, we are told, ‘with the result that on the first possible occasion the Germans armed again and got their own back; do you think we want to let them start again?’ But one does not need to be very worldly-wise to know that an excess of sympathy is always as dangerous as an excess of severity. It is however no cure for emotional stupidity in the past (if this indeed was the case) to refuse to be troubled over present matters which are bound to touch our feeelings, if we are human at all. I have no expert political or economic knowledge, I have no specialised ‘inside information’; I only want to mention one or two of the problems as they strike someone who has seen something of what they mean to the Germans, and who is afraid that the public conscience is insufficiently aroused.

The Jeunesse Maritime Chrétienne is a mass movement to reconquer the maritime world for Christ. It was at the Sea Apastolate Congress at Boulogne-sur-Mer, held in September 1929, that the first suggestion of forming a maritime section of the Jocistes was made by Père Lebret, O.P. This Dominican, who must be given the credit for launching the J.M.G., was formerly a lieutenant in the French navy. In collaboration with the Abbé G. Havard of Saint-Malo he drew up provisional rules. Cardinal Charost, Archbishop of Rennes, gave them a cordial blessing, and the new oeuvre was established in his diocese. The first group of Young Christian Seafarers to be formed was on the Ile-de-Sein, a small island off Finisterre, mostly inhabited by fisher folk. In January 1930 the first issue of Jeunesse Maritime was published. For the past seventeen years this monthly magazine has been the official mouthpiece of the J.M.C. During the next few months other groups were set up in many maritime parishes of Brittany, Normandy, the Côtes-de-Nord, and elsewhere in France. The movement spread rapidly. A large body of members of the J.M.C. took part in the French National Pilgrimage at Lourdes in August 1930.