Twelve months have now passed since the publication of the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine. The varied comments with which it has been received, both within the Church of England and outside it, have revealed much divergence of opinion as to the significance of its content and in consequence as to its value as an indication of the direction in which the Church of England is moving. Among Catholics, the tendency has been to judge it in the light of its obvious divergences from Catholic standards, particularly in regard to its apparent surrender, as necessary dogmas, of the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection of our Lord, and to write it down as proof positive of the final victory of modernism over orthodoxy in the Church of England. The Memorandum, published this month with the authority of the Council of the Church Union, is an illuminating commentary both upon the Report itself and also upon many of the judgements which have been made upon it. Indeed, it would not be untrue to say that for the outsider a real understanding of the Report is very difficult without its help. A judgement which assesses the Report merely in the light of its divergences from Catholic standards is shown to be superficial; a fruitful judgement must penetrate to the root of the problem and undertake two closely connected tasks The Report must be seen in its setting as the product of the Church of England as it is to-day, and the Church of England as it is to-day must be understood in relation to its past history if an estimate is to be made of the direction whither in the future it may move. The first of these tasks is admirably performed by the Memorandum; to the second, we shall return later.

Under the direction of the local committees of the K.F.A. film circles have been started. Very soon meetings were held in which authorised speakers explained the meaning of the film problem, and demonstrated that a film circle must be a nucleus of local activity in the sphere of Catholic Film Action. The members of such a circle form a bodyguard of workers in the great action for good films. They contribute energetically and in various ways to the realisation of the aim of Vigilanti Cura, and this not only by study and practical film labour, but also by participation in the propaganda of K.F.A. They are the people on whom K.F.A. can rely in the most difficult hours.

The film circle in Bois-le-Duc has already achieved much that is important. It has become active in the three most important parts of our task: study, propagation, and practical film work. Soon after its commencement this Film Circle held meetings, at which the problem of good films was treated in conformance with the Encyclical and short films were shown and discussed. It showed to the outside world very clearly its propagational character, when the local department of K.F.A. began its offensive at the beginning of June, 1937.

After the faithful had heard en masse of the inauguration of the world-film-action through a film-Sunday, about seven parochial meetings were held. At these meetings the film The Eternal Dream was shown, and at the same time the assembly heard an explanation of the essence and aim of the K.F.A.

The principal members of the Film Circle appeared as speakers and arrested the attention of the masses to the work of the K.F.A., through innumerable articles in the local Press, by home-visiting and other stimulating activities. In the domain of practical film labour also the film circle of Bois-le-Duc has turned to action.

Once,’ says Canon Dimnet, ‘I heard a shepherd saying that “the wind sat in France,”’ for the Canon was born in that frontier district of his country that was formerly part of the old Middle Kingdom of Lotharingia and later of the Duchy of Burgundy. Dimnet is a Frenchman born and bred; in My Old World he has created an unforgettable picture of the typical small town that was his birthplace, Trélon, with its gray spire dominating the flat landscape; but though the life of Trélon is French, its memories are of older allegiance, and the shepherd was recording in his phrase a time when, to the inhabitants of Trélon and all about Cambrai, the French were ‘foreigners.’

It is perhaps not too fanciful to see in this frontier background an explanation of Canon Dimnet’s extraordinary feeling for a language and a culture not his own. An uncle early taught him ‘simple English words; door, window, pen, book . . . and had given our dog quite a standing in the street by calling him, for some reason, Euston.’ The little flame lighted by his uncle grew during school days until at last, on going to teach at Douai, Ernest Dimnet came into contact with the English Benedictine community in that town. The effect upon him was startling. Even in their Catholicism they betrayed a new world: ‘I used to think my Benedictine friends, monks though they were, even more unclerical than I was.

It is not easy to express adequately in a single English word the concept implied in the German Grossstadt. It does not mean only metropolis or great city, not necessarily city at all; even a town may have the qualities of a Grossstadt. But if wre have not the word we certainly have the reality. All the great centres of industry, w'here men are gathered together in masses in order to provide for their livelihood and to keep going the great machine of modern civilisation can be described as Grossstädten. In the concrete it is London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle; and even the smaller towns in the industrialised areas share in its spirit, the mining centres of South Yorkshire, the cotton towns of Lancashire, and the dirty villages of County Durham (one of which was described by Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, as the worst in England).

These centres are either sprung out of a transformed countryside or men have come to them from quiet, orderly lives in the country. In either case they present a peculiar problem, which is part of the greater problem of man in the present age. The man of the great city (using this as the nearest equivalent of the German word) is a definite type, quite distinct from the countryman, and requires a distinctive approach on the part of those who are interested in his soul’s welfare.

How to make that approach has been the subject of a number of German brochures and even large books which have appeared in recent years.

The progress of Catholicism in Africa is so amazing that only the divine character of the Church can explain it. Yet we realize how much remains to be done when we recall the millions of coloured people still untouched by Christianity. And the need is urgent not only amongst indigenous negroes, but also amongst those of such a country as the United States, where live many millions of negroes crying out for the religion of God made Man. In the centre of New York is Harlem, the negro quarter, a town in itself well-nigh cut off from the neighbouring boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx, whilst in the southern States live many millions of negroes in far worse poverty and distress than in the days of slavery. These people want religion, for their simple nature is a religious one. But they are unwilling to accept the Christian religion as they see it practised, or rather distorted and falsified, by the whites. They want rather the riches and power that go with modem materialism and irreligion.

The story of the negro in U.S.A. is a sad one. Every year waves of horror and anger shake the whole of the negro population as fresh lynchings occur with a brutality that is unsurpassed by any other age in the history of this world. The Chinese torture of a thousand slices cannot be more cruel than the white southerner’s use of a blowlamp on a negro suspected of crime.

Are Catholics in the United States, or in the Union of South Africa, caring for these people, influencing them, as they ought? In the days of the Roman Empire there existed slavery, and that slavery was ended by the Catholic doctrine that by nature and birth all men are equal before God.

The same clothes, the same swing music, the same technological thinking, the same standardised responses, the same dances, the same transport communications: in other words, the same standardisation all the world over. ‘This uniformity is quite another thing than a structure of civilisation properly speaking, it is of an order not specifically human.’ The Manichee, in his contradictory thinking, desired to attain to a univocal perfection, to be swallowed up in the principle of good like a Buddhist in his Nirvana, to negate his own body to the point of race-suicide, a Pharisee concerning matter and profoundly anti-social. Modern man is an inverted Manichee: again desiring a univocal perfection, in a dialectic not of spirit but of matter, regarding the spirit as nothing or hating it as evil, enslaving mind and responsibility to the evolution of technique, exalting his own blood in the interests of race purity, exploiting and commercialising intelligence, and profoundly anti-personal. How true that Marx is the obverse of Hegel. The outcome of such mass-education is anarchy of thinking and feeling, against which we childishly protect ourselves by the sameness of our clothes.

Let us isolate one noteworthy aspect of this situation. To much modern thinking, the intelligence is a dangerous faculty, an anti-vital machine that skims the cream off things, that divides person from person and class from class, like the cathode rays that disintegrate alpha particles: it is the very principle of disintegration. The sub-human Utopia of the Communists, on the other hand, is the achievement of a material integration, it may be a leisure state to which technological progress will tend or an economic collectivity of the masses achieved in a strictly political field.

Catholicism, like Jewry, is persecuted because of its solidarity. But we are not forgetful for want of reminders that there is a Catholicism accurately distinguished by inverted commas: a heresy as subtle as that of the Pharisees: a ‘faith’ impotent to find expression in action. It is the faith of multitudes, but more especially of the elect. I would explain: it is the faith that has been called super-Catholicism.

Super. For it is courageous in condemnation (where the weaker brethren, through foolish sympathy or fear of inhumanity, fail), it is admired, rather than considered inordinate, for its craving for Test. Its width is infinite; dare I say, its depth negligible? It deplores ‘materialism’; its affirmation of trust in the Providence of God and indemnification hereafter renders suspect, almost, any suggestion of the obligations of justice here below. Yet, in its ‘simplicity,’ it inspires prayer for much more than Daily Bread, the sufficiency for which our Lord taught us to ask: and a host of additional delicacies is said to be the reward of this ‘childish faith.’ A Heavenly intimacy reduces the Saints to the level of contractors; familiarity does not, however, breed contempt.

It has a frugal trend. It is less costly to lavish devotion upon an idealised Christ than upon the Saviour, who (dying for mankind) promised thereafter to disguise himself as suffering humanity.

Now it is Super-Catholicism, and not Catholicism, that has no answer to the charge of individualism brought by communists and others against the Church of God. Would they (my super-Catholics) be as surprised as Communists to learn that the doctrinal conception of the Sacred Heart presents human society with a theory of true Communism?