For my part, I am not sure my mind is not made up one way or the other . . . but to conclude, I say this: if he was good we have seen in our day a great prophet; if bad, a very great man. . . .’

So wrote Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine who, as a boy of fifteen, may have seen Savonarola hanged in the Piazza della Signoria. Guicciardini was one of the cleverest Italians of his time and one of the most coolheaded of all time, and his mind was never cooler than when he penned his judgment on Savonarola. The dilemma it expresses can hardly be avoided unless one entirely disbelieves in ‘prophecy’. Certainly Guicciardini, for all his cool detachment, believed that God could still send prophets into the world; he used the term seriously; which may not have been the case with his near-contemporary and fellow-citizen Machiavelli who wrote off the ‘unnamed prophet’ as a failure. But even Machiavelli said ‘of such a man one should speak with reverence’; which, coming from such an observer, is a notable, if perhaps ironical, compliment to Savonarola, and is also valuable evidence of his reputation, in undevout circles, with the generation which followed his own.

A great prophet or a very great man: the Church has so far not resolved this dilemma by allowing or disallowing, finally, and officially, the first alternative. Certainly the name of Savonarola has been largely restored to favour. Nobody now calls him a heretic. His works are not on the Index. He has had public and recent praise from high authorities in the Church, for example from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin and from the late Master General of the Dominican Order.

On 21 September, 1452, Girolamo Savonarola was born in Ferrara, the third of seven children. His father came of Paduan stock, his mother, Elena dei Bonacossi, from a noble family of Mantua. The centenary has naturally given rise to renewed interest in the great Dominican whose character has always been so much debated, who has been so much admired and so much condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike.

Savonarola has been called the first Christian social reformer of modern times. It is as such only that I speak of him.

Social Christianity was for him the work which awaits both the body and the member, a vocation for all rather than the specialised task of a few not so much a struggle or a decisive battle, but a never-ending journey in which the traveller now slackens, now increases his pace, often retraces his footsteps, is ever watchful to the right and to the left of him, endures much hardship and meets strange travellers, but ‘in peace of mind makes always for the shore where he will embark upon the Eternal Sea’.

Writing nearly five hundred years before the secularist State and the Iron Curtain, Girolamo Savonarola reminded his generation that the time had come for words to give place to deeds, vain formula to real feeling. ‘Purify the spirit’, he said, ‘give heed to the common good, forget private interests. . . . Your reform must begin with spiritual things, for these are higher than material things, of which they are the Rule and the Life. And likewise all temporal good must be subordinated to the moral and religious good upon which it depends. And if you have heard it said that States cannot be governed by Paternosters, remember that this is the maxim of tyrants, of men hostile to God and the common weal, a rule for the oppression and not for the relief and liberation of cities.’

Sitting in club rooms, with cigars and brandy at call, there ‘is a stage in the evening when old colonels talking to younger officers will glance through the day’s news, saying: ‘World’s over-populated, you know. Needs a blood-bath now and then. Terrible things, wars, but they have to be. We’ve had our go. Be your turn soon.’ If the secret thus handed down from generation to generation is a professional one, at least it has the merits of being an open one; and, easy as such a secret is to scoff at, there is still a good deal of sense in it—even though that sense may be considered by some to be a primitive kind of horse- sense. For it conjures up a picture of the world such as it might be today had the Incarnation not yet occurred and, viewed from different angles, this is a theme which has interested Mr Evelyn Waugh for the past two decades.

In Vile Bodies (1930) one comes across its first statement:

High up in the Vosges, crowning a mountain, stands the sanctuary of Ste Odile. Below there stretches the immense plain of the Lower Rhine, with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral rising in the middle distance. For thirteen hundred years, amidst all the conflicts that have marked the history of Alsace, it has remained a point of rest. It was here, at the end of October, that there took place the third International Liturgical Conference sponsored by the Liturgical Institute of Trier and the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique of Paris. There could have been no more appropriate meeting-place for a work of reconciliation, for such is the purpose of these gatherings bringing together liturgical scholars and pastoral clergy from ten different countries, all alike concerned to render more effective the redemptive work of Christ which the Liturgy exists to declare and continue.

Previous meetings at Luxembourg and Maria-Laach had evoked the sympathetic interest of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Indeed the text of the restored Paschal Vigil issued in 1950 may be said to be a triumphant vindication, of the work of liturgical reform, and that precisely in the direction of the conference’s own efforts. For the Or do Sabbati Sancti is not just a piece of liturgical scholarship, designed to restore with archaeological accuracy a rite whose significance had been largely lost. It is all that, but much more is it a bold attempt to make the liturgical action a mystery in which the Christian people share. Hence the emphasis on a reduction and a simplification of the symbolism of the rite, so that the central theme of death and resurrection, darkness and light, may stand revealed in all its strength. Hence, too, the provision that the congregation should at this point of the Christian mystery, and in their own language, renew the baptismal vows which the Paschal rite enshrines.

The publication of the ‘Life’ of Father Bede Jarrett by Kenneth Wykeham-George, O.P., and Gervase Mathew, OP. (Blackfriars Publications; 12s. 6d.) is an event of more than usual significance for this review, of which Fr Bede was the founder and for a time the Editor. Readers of Blackfriars will scarcely need the recommendations of reviewers to draw their attention to the biography of the Dominican whose inspiration was so important in the early and difficult days of this journal’s career. We are fortunate in being able to publish the tributes of two of his friends, Sir Ernest Barker and Fr C. C. Martindale, S.J., occasioned by the appearance of his biography and a reminder, eighteen years after his death, of the extent of his true achievement. sir ernest barker writes:

Many memories came back to my mind as I read Father Wykeham-George’s and Father Mathew’s Life of Bede Jarrett. I was carried back nearly fifty years, to the year 1904. (or was it 1905?) when he became my pupil and read with me for Honours in the School of Modern History. The way it happened was this. I had had for some time a connection with the Benedictine house of residence (then called Hunter-Blair’s Hall), and I had taught some of the Benedictines—not least Father Paul Nevill, now and for many years past the Headmaster of Ampleforth College. The Benedictines—as has been their wont for nearly 1,500 years—were hospitable; and their Hall in Oxford was the hospitium of members of other Orders. One of the ‘guests’, or rather members, of Hunter-Blair’s Hall was Father Bede Jarrett; and that was how he became my pupil, two years after Father Paul Nevill. He read with me down to the year 1907, when he took his Schools and was placed high in the First Class. (I was one of the examiners that year, and I was proud of the sustained excellence of his work.) It was a very good year, both among the men and the women students: Lord Eustace Percy was another man who was placed in the first class, and among the women was Professor Ada Levett, as she afterwards became, whom I had also taught for a little time in her student days.