The Nationalization of the Mines.

Amid the complexity of the dispute between the mine-owners and the miners it is well to remember that the miners are making nothing more than a simple demand for sufficiency and security. We are told that there is a world glut of coal, that more coal is being produced than the demand justifies, and that there are more men in the mines than the mines can support. Hence the deadlock: the mines, it is said, cannot give the sufficiency and security that the miners demand.

The nationalization of the mines, that is to say, making them the property of the State to be administered by State officials, is being put forward as a possible remedy, and it will no doubt be one of the chief issues at the next General Election. The most enthusiastic advocates of diffused ownership and private property for all and the stoutest opponents of a Collectivist State will not deny the right of the State to own some national property. The State must possess the means of defence—all the property implied in its duty of maintaining order within its borders and securing itself from agression from without. No one but an anarchist would dispute this.

But there are other kinds of property which are best owned by the State. The Postal services, the supply of water, gas and electricity, and the tramways, are perhaps best administered in public rather than private hands. The highways, the waterways, territorial seawaters and certain forest lands are best in the hands of the State in order to check monopoly and the undue advantage that private persons might have if they possessed them.

In this generation we still invoke the Saints. But we no longer make friends of them. We hardly know them. We charge them with our commissions without knowing anything about their qualifications. We are satisfied with their good references. Ask that good woman kneeling before the plaster statue of St. Anthony of Padua what she can tell you of the great ascete and miracle worker. All she knows is that he keeps a lost property office.

‘Through the influence of Protestantism an abstract representation of Spiritual things has supplanted the realistic, mystic and living faith of our forefathers. We have lost at the same time both our sense of the supernatural and of the material in the practice of our religion. The faithful of the Middle Ages really felt and realised Our Lord’s presence amongst them. They confided themselves to Mary as to a real Mother, they grasped the hands of their Guardian Angels, believed in the Devil and lived, without self-consciousness, in happy companionship with their patron Saints. Now, though we still commemorate them and invoke them, our Saints do not follow us out of church.’

So says M. Henri Ghéon in his preface to his volume of Jeux et Miracles four le Peuple Fidele, in which he tells us something of his purpose and ideals in his religious dramatic art. M. Ghéon finds the Saints and their lives and doings as vivid and as dramatic as any personalities or situations he could invent, and he has devoted his very charming talent to making them known to us, his contemporaries, as living human characters.

I have just finished reading Father Vincent McNabb’s inspiring book The Church and the Land, aptly described by the author as a ‘bugle-call,’ and in die May number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor asks the question, ‘Wherefore sound the bugle if there be none to answer the call?’

I believe that there are many only too anxious to answer, not only amongst the unemployed, but amongst those also who are ill-employed, working at any sort of a job in the cities because a living must be made somehow for men and wives and children. Since the war, how many men have been forced by sheer want into taking on work of this sort, quite apart from the fact that they, no more than the ‘practical objector’s’ unemployed, are fitted for it neither by temperament, training nor inclination?

Amongst these city workers in uncongenial jobs in factories and offices, there are many who suffer acutely from the pangs of land-hunger, men and women who have the love of the earth in their very blood, whose ancestors—in many cases not more than two or three generations back—were farmers, and whose keenest desire is to get back to the soil and toil to which they feel themselves called almost as powerfully as a priest to his vocation—for surely, save that of the priest, there can be no labour nearer to God than that of the land worker.

By reason of these, then, the bugle does not sound to deaf ears, but to hearts to whom it comes as the call of hope and life itself.

If we are to value St. John’s witness to the Blessed Sacrament as it ought to be valued, we must understand what his words added to the witness of the three Evangelists who had preceded him. Moreover, we must realise the state of doctrine and church order which obtained when the Fourth Gospel was written.

When St. John determined to write yet another Gospel, the Church of Jesus Christ had taken definite shape. In spite of momentary hesitations, here and there it had met denials of its doctrine by quite simple affirmations. At the first Council of Jerusalem it had very definitely taken a step which severed it from the parent womb of Judaism, and gave it a separate personal existence. In contradistinction to the Iou&uot [Jews or Judeans] so prominent in the Fourth Gospel, the Church was now called Xpianavot [Christians]. Not only did men distinguish these two in fact; but they distinguished them in name. The separation between child and parent was complete.

In this process of separation few things if any had been so powerful as the Holy Eucharist. What the sabbath sacrifices were to Jewry the Holy Eucharist was to the Church. To the Pagan world a Jew was a man who refused to join in pagan temple worship; but once a week, on the Sabbath, worshipped in a synagogue. To the same pagan world the Christian soon began to be recognised as one who refused to join in pagan temple-worship; but once a week, on what he called the Lord’s Day, worshipped in his own assembly.

The first Dominicans came to Russia in 1222, only a year after another group of Friars had set foot for the first time on English soil.

With the exception of the Apostolic times, no other period in the history of the Church can be compared to the first half of the thirteenth century. In founding their respective Orders both Dominic and Francis gave such an impulse to the entire Catholic world that during subsequent centuries their successors had only to follow in the footsteps of their great predecessors. It was to Hyacinth, one of his first disciples, that St. Dominic entrusted the mission of evangelizing Northern Europe.

St. Hyacinth was a member of the noble Polish family of Odrowaz, and had been received into the Order of Preachers in 1220. Shortly afterwards, accompanied by three other Polish friars, St. Hyacinth returned to his native country. In Cracow he founded his first monastery, and then started on his missionary journey. In two years the Saint had visited Poland, Prussia, Denmark, Scandinavia, Finland. Everywhere his passage was marked by the establishment of Dominican monasteries. In 1222 he at last reached Red Russia, or Galicia, and, having founded a monastery in Halic, proceeded to Kiev.

At that time Russia presented an agglomeration of principalities (Oudiely), governed by princes, descendants of Saint Vladimir, the most important principality being that of Kiev, whose Great Prince was the doyen amongst the other princes.

Corpus Christi Day in Rome generally finds the tide of foreign visitors on the ebb, happily so, at least from one point of view. The curious crowds who invade the churches in Holy Week are not always drawn by religion, nor is their presence always an aid to devotion. But by the time the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday comes the mere tripper has left for a cooler climate and other ‘sights,’ and the Italian, with those who know and appreciate his religion, is left more or less undisturbed. Sophistication vanishes, simplicity returns, and one has the feeling that what stage-managing there is comes from pure interest in the occasion, from an undivided attention to a great tradition. Corpus Christi Day processions are beautiful anywhere, but hardly anywhere do they show such ingenuous elaboration, such mingling of local pride, childlike pleasure, and natural beauty as at Genzano, the little town in the wine-growing country near Rome, above Lake Nemi.

For the people of Genzano and the country for miles round it is not only the festival of Corpus Domini; it is the Infiorata, the festival of the flowers. The religion of the country and the life and pleasures of the local inhabitants are intermixed in a way which only a people who have no doubts can show. It is, of course, a public holiday, and after the early Masses the cafes and the wineshops are full. A committee of townspeople is formed to organise the Infiorata.

Among those people who are conscious of and annoyed by the complete badness manifest in the building and decoration, in use in the Catholic Church in our days, there are very few who regard the matter as anything more than a superficial defect that can be, with care, remedied. There are few who realise the essentially malignant and even mortal nature of the infection that so ails us.

Most of these people speak with varying degrees of confidence about ways and means of ‘improving the taste of the Faithful,’ of educating people up to this or that notion. Again, others propose the copying on a vast scale the works of certain respectable and accredited masters of the past centuries, thereby improving the ‘outward appearance’ of churches and images. By this manoeuvre they hope to get the unsuspecting worshipper used to the form and comeliness of the Italian primitives and other work of men who lived in more civilized periods than our own— so leading them on until, after a very few years of this aesthetic welfare-work, the most suburban Catholic will revile the pink and white Madonnas as supplied by the ‘church-furniture shop’ and have nothing less than exact reproductions of Giotto or sixth century Byzantine.

Whatever may be said for these sincere attempts of pious people, the root of the matter is left untouched ; it is not even approached. The issue is usually confused by a notion of ‘giving the best to God.’ I say confused because it creates in the mind the notion that there can be constructed a kind of scale of beauty,

The Saints have their spiritual lineage, their spiritual fecundity. We can trace, for instance, in one direct line of vital influence, the mystic genealogy of St. Theresa of Jesus through St. Catherine of Siena to St. Gertrude. But the great Avilan, that giantess among the Saints and ‘Mater Spiritualium,’ is invited to rejoice more ecstatically, because a whole world of Carmels is peopled with her daughters,

The noblest quality of the Saint is the power he possesses of begetting others in his spirit. Each friend of Jesus in his turn finds in himself, in some degree, a superabundance of exceptional graces by which he can help in giving life to others: to others who will, in due time, be able to stand up to the world and answer for themselves. Among the offspring of Theresa of Spain one sweet violet has drawn to herself, in love and veneration, the whole Catholic world of our generation. Jesus is in her, reconciling the sinful, sentimental multitudes to His holy love. There is now a gospel according to Theresa. It is a gospel poured forth upon a thirsty world from a heart so full of grace that no barrier of age or sex or enclosure could prevent it from leaping forth into the sunlight, to delight Christendom. ‘We cannot help uttering what we have seen and heard,’ protested the Apostles; and the new St. Theresa has seen and heard, and she, too, must needs speak, teaching her ‘little way,’ better than the best of bodhi-sattvas.