As readers of Blackfriars are likely to have and to have read the Encylical itself, we shall have begun to satisfy our duty to our Holy Father if we call attention to some of its main statements and principles.

It is just a little disconcerting that our Holy Father has to acknowledge that gratitude for the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII was not universal even among Catholics. Thus he is obliged to write of the Rerum Novarum :

The same paternal rebuke of Catholics is to be found in another passage dealing with Workmen’s Associations or Trade Unions which had been advocated by Pope Leo XIII :

To use the dialect Shaw loves and uses so well, he is ‘as cute as a pet fox,’ and I for one believe him when he says that many Catholics approved of his treatment of Saint Joan. What I refuse to believe is that a man of his cool judgment on so many matters could go ‘blind and bald-headed’ into that intricate subject, Amazing, truly, in the trial scene of his play is the elaborate care with which he states the case for the established order. Yet lo! the snare spread in full sight of the bird, and the birds of the less experienced order have been caught—with chaff. Shaw’s chaff in this case is an error in a matter of fact and a misreading of even the fact under his eyes. He dismisses in a word the whole rehabilitation of Saint Joan, he whitewashes Cauchon thick as plaster of Paris, and he muddles the end of the trial to justify his view of Cauchon.

In a recent article in Blackfriars it was well and truly shown how the Dominicans befriended the Maid as much as the said Cauchon would let them, which was very little indeed. It is all very fine for Shaw to ignore everything in the Rehabilitation, which was commanded by the Pope to be reopened after it had failed twice over. It is all finer still for him to ignore the pulverization administered by Andrew Lang to Anatole France’s (whatever his real name was) two-volume sneer at everyone of Joan’s century, but the man who says that all men are liars even on oath in a ‘superstitious’ age, cannot himself escape being thought a somewhat excessive liar. All this Shaw gladly risks, at the expense of ruining the best dramatic points in the muddled trial scene of his play, in order to get at the Church, and not the Church of those days, but of all time.

Catholic not being a true socialist, ought not to call himself a socialist. The Pope has said so.

The true socialist, the genuine Marxist, was never a Catholic and never could be one. For the economic theory that capitalism was fated by inexorable law to pass away, superseded by a class-conscious proletariat that would order all industry on a basis of social equality and thereby produce a co-operative commonwealth, was the dogma and the hope of the true socialist. We say was because when Lenin and his supporters resolved to enforce in their own way the Marxian doctrine in Russia, the old-fashioned Marxian socialist, particularly in England and Germany, was profoundly shocked. Hyndman, the ‘father of English socialism,’ with Kautsky and the ‘old guard’ of the German Social-Democratic Party, protested that Lenin and the Russian communists were not behaving according to plan, since no classconscious proletariat had yetbeen organised in Russia. What happened at Moscow queered the pitch altogether for socialism. The Bolshevik tyranny, in fact, did not, and has not, inaugurated social equality, neither has it produced the co-operative commonwealth of the socialist vision.

Shelley told Leigh Hunt in the duomo at Pisa that a new religion might be founded on charity instead of faith. It is in quite another sense that it is now so often and so passionately declared that what is wanted is not charity, but justice; further, that charity is only possible in an unjust society. It is one of the gravamina against the Gospel that it says so much about charity. ‘Curse your charity!’ was the legend on a Hyde Park banner. And ‘Christian-Socialist’ divines go so far as to say : ‘We do not want brotherhood, but justice.’ The reason is obvious. Brotherhood speaks of sympathy and helpfulness, of mercy and gratitude; whereas what is demanded is rather equal rights.

So St. Simonism, that pantheistic and epicurean religion of humanity, had for its object ‘the harmonious development of human society by the establishment of justice, and the increase of well-being and comfort.’ Roaring Camp and Poker Flat have also this aim.

In a verdant field, bespangled with daisies, stand the ruins of a noble mansion once known as Palace House, Titchfield. A little to the right may be seen the soft grey tones of a Gothic window in a ruined wall, the relics of an ancient Abbey that once stood upon this site. At the rear is a large pond, formerly part of the Abbey Fishponds. High brick walls surround the turreted mansion with its Tudor chimneys, whilst an older stone wall abuts the ruined archway.

The spot is peaceful and serene beyond compare; here and there are ancient timbered barns, whilst hard by flows the ‘silver Meon’ : the stream whose praises were so often sung by that famous fisherman, Izaac Walton. The river is spanned by an old bridge, at the side of which snugly lies a little Inn, ‘The Fisherman’s Rest.’ The undulating land is well wooded. Between the trees may be seen the old roofs of Titchfield village and the shingled spire of its Saxon Church.

Sea-gulls swooping over the fields proclaim the nearness of the sea. Titchfield was once an important harbour in Hampshire, until the river was artificially blocked at its mouth and the sea marshes reclaimed for cultivation.

Wales is the lost Brittany of Catholicism in this island. The Reformation was ill-received by the people, and for some considerable time the loyalty of the Welsh to the old religion was a force on which the leaders of Catholicism could rely. For a generation or more after the accession of Elizabeth the religious opinions and prejudices of the greater number of Welshmen are best represented by the forceful lines of the schoolmaster-poet, Richard Gwyn of Llanidloes :

Adam, the first man had
But one Paradise;
And there is but one Church, upon a hill.
Where there is right communion.
She is conspicuous as the sun,
. . . . .
And she is dowered beyond price,
Though smoke mounts from Satan’s pit,
Between the blind man and the sky.

In the end Catholicism in Wales perished, for the most part rather from inanition than from any very positive process of conversion to Protestantism.

Strype, speaking of the middle of the sixteenth century, says:

Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1831, Thomas Carlyle published his Sartor Resartus which, in his amusing manner of mock bombast, he claimed to be the first contribution of a fundamental character addressed to the British reader on the Philosophy of Clothes. It is probably quite an accident that Mr. Eric Gill’s book, Clothes’ appears in this year of grace 1931 : there is no evidence that he is falling in with the modern craze for celebrating obscure centenaries, or that he has any wish to revive interest in that solemn, sombre man who used to be called (how strange it sounds now !) the Sage of Chelsea. In fact, the two books bear little relation to one another, and they are separated by more important and significant things than by the big gap of a century. They agree in these particulars; each is very much the product of its age, dated 1831 and 1931 respectively; each is written by a man of genius who has an interest in stonecutting, though many will agree that Mr. Gill’s gift is pre-eminently for designing and sculpture and the cutting of letters, and less conspicuously for letters pure and simple; and each is in the nature of a satire which must have given its author great joy to write—Carlyle’s inclining to be sardonic and somewhat turgid, Gill’s more of a brilliant school-boy lark, scurrilous and Rabelaisian.