It is pathetic to see a young life coming of age merely to die. It is tragic if the death is due to the indifference and neglect of those who have brought the young life into being, and are responsible for its continuance. There is some danger that this year English Catholics may be, not merely witnesses of such a domestic tragedy, but actually the villains of the piece.

The Catholic Social Guild comes of age this year. At its annual meeting, just held in Oxford, it assembled its friends for the customary rejoicings. But the debutante was found to be seriously ill, sick almost to death. Instead of congratulations and good wishes for the future, there was to be heard a thin, tired voice uttering what sounds perilously like a valedictory death-bed speech.

‘Last year,’ it said, ‘we made a loss of £86. This year it is £85. The surplus of £74 on the old balance sheet has disappeared and become a deficit of £11. Our expenditure cannot be reduced below its present amount if any sort of organisation and propaganda is to be maintained. Our income is below that—our regular income from subscriptions very much below that. Whether we meet again here will depend upon whether we survive the crisis by increasing our income. If the Guild goes, the Democrat goes, the Year Book goes, and eventually the Workers’ College also goes.’

With the ignorance that is so common in matters concerning Spain, it is often stated and more generally thought that Spain was an obstacle to the Renaissance, if by Renaissance is understood the Reformation, then the statement is true. As it stands it is far from the truth. It is lamentable enough that the simplest facts about Spain should not form part of the average Englishman’s education, but such ignorance is unpardonable in a Catholic. This attitude towards Spain has a long and interesting history behind it, but it is time it were abandoned. Mere misguided supposition should give way to intelligent search and, what is even more important, to intelligent understanding.

No period of Spanish history is more instructive and enlightening than the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period from 1475 to 1700. It was the period that saw Spain rise from a group of medieval states to the premier position among the nations of the world and then sink down into a condition of almost complete political insignificance. The Renaissance in Spain explains both medieval and modern Spain. It is the logical development of the one as well as the necessary cause of the other.

Attention has been focussed on this relatively far-away island owing to the fact that it celebrates this year the thousandth anniversary of its Parliament. For Catholics it is also a memorable summer as it sees the entry to his See of a first Icelandic Bishop since the ‘Reformation.’ The new Bishop of Holar is of Danish birth and has laboured for many years in Iceland. He has perforce to live away from his see. For Holar, in northern Iceland, which once had a fair cathedral and was a famous seat of Catholic learning is now only a name. I vividly remember arriving there in the late afterglow of a northern summer night after a long day’s ride culminating in a steep mountain slope even in August deep with snow. Holar lies far below in a fertile green valley watered by many streams. Just as Holar now possesses a Bishop and no cathedral, conversely the Faroe Isles, four hundred miles away, have a cathedral without a chief pastor.

At Kirkubae, south of Thorshavn, stands an unfinished stone building in Gothic style. It was never consecrated, and yet it has not been desecrated to any profane use. It remains roofless to the sky, a perpetual reminder of the faith which built it and of those who prevented its completion.

Of them ‘that go down to the sea in ships’ Saint-Malo, assuredly, has never had any lack. For the last five hundred years she has been the home of a sea-faring people; adventurers, discoverers, privateers—sometimes little better than pirates—she numbers them in plenty among her citizens, as we have good and convincing cause to remember. For it must be frankly confessed that not only did they dispute with us the freedom of the seas, but at one time it was not we who always had the best of the argument. In fact, to be honest, we suffered very considerably at the hands of these free-lances; and it is a surprising thing to remember that these men raised the little rock-city of their birth to be a power in France, and a danger to England. When the size of Saint-Malo is taken into consideration, this is a rather remarkable achievement.

Only a few of their names are familiar to us, though many more are preserved in the annals of the little town on the Brittany coast; and perhaps it is worth while to recall something of what is known of them. Commanding their own ships while they were yet boys (Duguay-Trouin was only sixteen); growing incredibly rich and piling up adventures as other lads steal apples; something more than a guild—almost a family, closely interlinked by marriage and descent; merchants sending out their own ships to trade as well as to fight, fighters manning their own ships to defend their trade—to read the story of their exploits is like turning over the pages of a fairy tale.

We have deliberately used the phrase, ‘NeoMalthusian Birth-Control,’ because the simple phrase ‘Birth-Control’ is likely to mislead. It is not accurate to say that the Church condemns birth-control. What the Church condemns, or rather what the Church has no power to allow, is not birth-control, but birth-control by sinful methods. The Church has always had a most efficient method of birth-control, by conjugal and virginal chastity. She has never urged what Neo-Malthusians say she has urged : ‘reckless propagation.’ Indeed, her normal action seems everywhere to have resulted, not in such an increase of population as this island has seen since the Industrial revolution, but in a steady maintenance of a high level of population largely dwelling on the land.

On the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles II there appeared in The Times a most interesting article on that monarch and his time by Keith Feiling. The typically English attitude of mind towards the history of that reign expressed in its lines must, however, have roused the attention of Catholic readers, especially his allusion to ‘the half truths of which Oates got hold.’

It is matter for conjecture how many of his non-Catholic readers were aware of the whole truth where it touches Titus Oates and the malignant story of his career. To be sure, no historian defends the man who, according to Macaulay, was ‘the founder of the school of false witnesses.’ Every Englishman has learned at school that Titus Oates was a miscreant of the most evil and mischievous genius; that the men who were condemned to death on the strength of his false accusation were innocent victims of a politically engineered plot which had as its background the end of frustrating the Catholic succession to the throne. The end, in the mind of the average protestant Englishman, was laudable, although it did not justify the means adopted by the Government in this case.