In his Whitsuntide address the Holy Father, Pius XII, lurcher developed the principles of the Right Christian Order for Society. To the Five Peace Points concerning the relations that must exist between states he adds the principles—the Christian view of the Family, Property, and Labour—needed for the internal order of the State. ‘These are the principles, conceptions and rules under which we may co-operate as from now on in the future organisation of that New Order for the birth of which out of the dreadful effervescence of the present struggle, the world is waiting and wishing.’ We have the Holy Father’s authority for making our effort in the present struggle positive in character, not simply to slay the ‘Beast from the Abyss,’ but also to re-fashion a healthier countryside than the one in which it made its appearance. This effort towards reconstruction should be identified with our war-effort to give the latter real driving force. Catholics are rightly urged to co-operate with all sincere Christians in working and fighting for a happier state of society. And we may, to that extent, welcome less clear pronouncements from the representatives of Protestant States. Thus President Roosevelt declared: ‘To-day the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom, between pagan Brutality and the Christian ideal. We choose human freedom, which is the Christian ideal.’ And Mr. Eden, stating the British war aims for the first time, claimed that ‘only our victory can restore, both to Europe and to the world, that freedom which is our heritage from centuries of Christian civilisation and that security which alone can make possible the betterment of man’s lot upon the earth.’

It is now over fifty years since my old teacher of Elocution, Father Paul Stapleton, O.P., taught me on the authority of Father Dominic Aylward, O.P., that usually the most important page of a book is the title page. For this reason let me set out the title of a book that was sent of God into my hands in the Lent of 1941:

St. Thomas More’s History of the Passion

Translated from the Latin iby his grand-daughter Mistress Mary Bassett

Edited in modern spelling with an introduction by Right Reverend Mgr. P. L. Hallett

London

Burns Oates and Washbourne Ltd.

Publishers to the Holy See

’ You must not thitik that you shall take leave from love. Behold, they who said they loved you could not love. And if your heart were as full of love as the bottomless sea, it would all be drunk in by the love of the Beautiful Lover.'—Henry Suso.

The fourteenth century may justly be called the classic period of German mysticism, for it gave birth to the great triad of Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and John Tauler, all of them Dominicans.

The conditions in which they lived were, indeed, almost ideal for the development of a Christian mysticism of the highest order. Their time was a time of widespread and intense suffering for Church and people alike. The Church, in the person of the Popes, was persecuted by the Emperors; epidemics were rife in town and country, and frequent interdicts deprived the faithful of the consolations of Religion often for years at a time. Thus, in the desolation of a life whose insecurity and transitoriness were only too apparent, souls sought and found stability in a personal relationship with God which the vicissitudes of earthly existence could not affect and death itself would but transform and fulfil. This close intercourse between God and the soul was cultivated, especially among the nuns and lay communities of women whose direction was entrusted almost exclusively to the Dominicans. This contact between the highly strung spirituality of the nuns and the theological austerity of the disciples of St. Dominic produced a wonderfully enriched mystic life. Securely rooted in Thomistic doctrine, the flower of Dominican mysticism drew from the Angelic Doctor all his learning, sanity, and balance, developing his own mystic elements in the less restrained atmosphere of feminine tenderness and devotion.

Anyone assisting at Mass in the Chapel of the Fathers of the Assumption in Paris on a May morning in the year 1865 might have observed the frail, slightly mis-shapen figure of a woman, bowed in prayer. On enquiry he would have learnt that her name was Antoinette Fage, the directress of an orphanage run by some charitable ladies, a Tertiary of St. Dominic, and a recent penitent of the Assumptionist Père Pernet. He would have required unusual prescience to have discerned in this small delicate woman, already in her forty-second year, the Foundress of a Congregation that would spread to two Continents before the end of the century.

Left a virtual orphan at the age of thirteen by the death of her mother, her spine permanently injured in an accident during her childhood, Antoinette grew tip in an atmosphere of sorrow and suffering. Thus early she learnt her first lessons in resignation to the Divine Will. ‘It was His Holy Will that I should suffer anguish of mind, sadness of heart and extreme bodily pain so that I might the more easily enter into the sufferings of others and minister to them,’ she said in later years.

Antoinette was cared for by kind friends until site was old enough to earn her living with her needle. In 1850 she joined a dressmaking establishment, and it was about that time that she first became acquainted with the Dominican Fathers. Of a naturally religious nature, gifted by God with remarkable qualities of heart and mind, yet with a highly-strung temperament and a want of confidence in her own powers, she needed the direction of a master of the spiritual life. For the next fourteen years she was to find in Père Faucillon, O.P., such a director.

Cajetan rightly observes that in these words our Lord, describing the way and state of the Spirit, described also the way and state of the spiritual man. Now, since Christ our Lord, the very truth, declares most plainly that this is the case of everyone who is born of the Spirit, we should conclude that the state of the spiritual man, as formed by the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, cannot be explained in any better way than by the similitude here employed by our Lord.

Note, therefore, that this text lays down three conditions for the state of the spiritual man.

The role of Germany is written in the clearest print upon the map of Europe. In the centre of the European land mass it is, apart from Russia, the greatest homogeneous unit within that mass. With some seventy-eight million inhabitants, largely self-sufficient in food, with great industrial resources of every kind, its inhabitants have spilled over its natural limits and can be found beyond the Vistula, the Bohemian Mountains, the Alps, the Danube and the Rhine. Racially, linguistically, and self-consciously distinct, this nation has vast dynamic energies which it is supremely capable of organising and a strong historic consciousness of its geographical-historical position. That position has two aspects. As the Germanic tribes silted into their present territories, they had the Roman Empire on their Western flank, a static and friable organisation inviting aggression; on their Eastern flank the tribal and barbaric wave beat up against them. The attitude bred by that situation still remains, a feeling of predatory virility towards the Western and settled nations, the lands of the evening; an attitude of cultural defensiveness towards the vast, level, amorphous frontiers to the East. There is no doubt what is Germany’s natural role; it is to be the mistress of Europe.

Divine Providence has apparently ordained that she should be a mistress too tyrannical to be tolerated. For this enormous and extremely able nation has certain obvious psychological defects which make the unrestricted use of its natural supremacy intolerable. It is a very selfconscious nation; it is a politically immature nation; it is an arrogant nation; a warlike one; cruel, unscrupulous, emotional. There is a dark strain of tribalism and totemism in its make-up, despite enormous civilised achievements.