Not the least embarrassment of the French bishops, in the present political crisis of France, has been to decide whether Catholics should be called upon to forget the constant annoyance and petty persecution to which they are still subjected—even since the fall of M. Herriot’s deliberately anti-Catholic Government—and to respond generously to all appeals made by the Government, as though the union sacrée which M. Herriot brought to an end were still really in existence. It is true that, since M. Herriot’s downfall, the open challenge to the Church on the question of the Vatican’ Embassy has not been officially renewed. The threats to the religious communities which have settled in France in defiance of the laws proscribing them, have not been carried out; though the inquisition into their numbers and their status throughout the country, which was set up by M. Herriot’s Government and methodically organised, has placed full information in the Government’s hands, which may at any time be made use of by an anti-clerical Government. And the attempt to compel Alsace and Lorraine to accept the same educational system as the rest of France has also been suspended.

But all over the country minor incidents have continued to provoke violent resentment. The Ministry for the Interior, which controls the whole local government of the country, and through the distribution of patronage arid by more direct means ‘makes’ the elections in a manner calculated to ensure the permanent success of the Left, has always been jealously kept in the hands of anti-clerical Ministers even during the war; and the Prefects nominated by them have been using their powers to prohibit religious processions, and to interfere in various other ways with such liberties as the Catholics still possess.

The cartoon with which Punch expressed its bewildered opinion of the Irish settlement deserves to be remembered in history. After more than two centuries of deliberate exploitation of anti-Irish sentiment in the north-east of Ireland, the leader of the Ulster Unionists is represented in the most characteristic organ of British middle-class opinion, as uniting with the President of the Free State to pick the pocket of John Bull. In actual fact, the Ulster Government’s financial ‘benefits through the settlement would appear to consist in a grant for the Ulster Parliament buildings and the separate Ulster Law Courts—neither of which were ever asked for by the Ulster Unionists, but were, on the contrary, accepted by them in response to an urgent appeal by the Imperial Parliament. There is a further financial concession also in the continuation for one year of the annual grant in aid of the Ulster Special Constabulary, but on the clear understanding (never before insisted upon) that this latest grant of roughly a million pounds must be the last. No Irish Catholic is likely to sympathise with Sir James Craig’s lamentations at the fact that the ‘Specials’ must therefore be disbanded; but even the Ulster ‘Specials’ would never have come into existence except to defend the jurisdiction of the Ulster Parliament in the area for which the Orange Lodges agreed, under urgent appeals, to accept responsibility.

In the April number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor was good enough to print in full a letter in which I advanced the opinion that the time has come for the establishment of a Catholic Daily Paper. The suggestion has, of course, been made before, more than once, but has always been opposed on the ground that Catholics are not sufficiently united to support such a venture. This has always seemed to me to be putting the effect before the cause; surely a Catholic Daily would produce that unity as no other organisation could ever hope to; and so what is put forward by many as being an argument against is, in effect, one of the most powerful arguments in favour.

The question cannot fail to be of interest, not only to Catholics, but to many others, and as the course of events, almost from day to day, only serves to give strength to my conviction, I will state briefly my case for the establishment of a Catholic Daily in the hope that it will at least bring the realisation a stage nearer.

A Man who seven hundred years ago lived from the age of twenty-five to that of forty-five a life of extreme self-discipline, and who yet preached of love and joy with a Doric simplicity, has captured the imagination of the modern world, as he did that of his contemporaries, and been found so faultless and so fascinating that both those who are scholars and those who are not keep on bringing out new books, as we see once more. His joy and his love of nature, which made him hail the water and the moon and death as his sisters, and the sun and the wind and fire as his brothers, call even to the present age with a sweet secret voice, and there is in holiness itself a romance which stirs the heart of the most earthly of us. But otherwise it would be hard to explain the popularity of St. Francis of Assisi, or to tell why so many people share enthusiasm with the Catholic pilgrims who are now crowding the Umbrian town which, seen from Perugia, looks like a pale patch upon a purple hill, why, in every country, many ordinary people are thinking of that scene of 1226 when the worn-out body, poor ill-treated Brother Ass, refused to go any further, and marked strangely in hands and feet and side, as though a copy of the Crucified, it grew finally still in the twilight of an October evening in a thatched cell on the plain beneath the little town, while, according to St. Bonaventura, innumerable larks, with full throats, alighted on the thatch, singing the songs of dawn at nightfall.

English public men very seldom make any public allusion to the activities of the Holy See. Very few of them give much attention either to its influence or to its policies. Sir Rennell Rodd, however, as British Ambassador to Rome from 1908 until 1919, had ample opportunities for becoming aware of the Pope’s existence as an international force. And in his latest volume of reminiscences, which cover the whole period of the war, he discreetly reveals here and there his own observations and suspicions concerning the Vatican. Indeed, he does not disguise the fact that the information which reached him in his official capacity from various sources caused him constant apprehension during the war. And after the death, in August, 1914, of Pope Pius X (whom he credits with sufficiently ‘humane’ motives to have been likely to develop pro-Ally tendencies had he lived), Sir Rennell quite plainly regards the Holy See as being engaged in constant intrigues to bring the war to an end prematurely upon conditions advantageous to the Central Powers.

What is crime? Who is a criminal? The questions persist; they call for answer every time the Reports of Prison Commissioners are issued. Before we decide how the criminal is to be treated let us know who the criminal is; let us discover how any one of us, at present, it may well be, unconvicted and at large, can fall into crime and be lodged in gaol. Why do we put people in prison? is the first question. Arising out of that (as the House of Commons would express it) is the supplementary question : How are we to treat our neighbour when we have put him (or her) in prison? In short, What is crime, and how is it committed?

Father Francis Day, in his booklet, The Community and the Criminal, rightly called a ‘guide to Catholic service,’ so full is it of helpful information and the wise counsel of experience for all Catholics who would help our prisoners and captives—offers as ‘a working definition of crime’ :—’ A deliberate act contrary to those laws of the State which enforce or interpret the Natural Law.’ And this Natural Law, Father Day reminds us, is ‘universal, based on human nature and manifested by reason.’

If this definition be true, and far be it from the layman to suggest doubt, how few, how very few, are the inmates of prison—past or present—who can justly be labelled ‘criminal.’ The State, indeed, makes no pretence of requiring general obedience to Natural Law.

A good deal of fuss has been made one way and another about the Catholic Association’s Christmas pilgrimage to Rome; vivid pictures were drawn of the horrors of third-class continental trains, especially at night: the idea of staying in Rome at anything but an hotel was supposed to be particularly revolting : while even the Association itself thought it necessary to print in heavy type a warning extract from the Bull Indictio Universalis fubilaei urging pilgrims to accept discomforts in a spirit of penitence.

Quite apart from the fact that, once a man has made up his mind to visit St. Peter, nothing will stop him, these vaticinators might have kept their breath for their prayers. There were no hardships; and of discomforts, no more than any healthy man or woman, to say nothing of a pilgrim, would regard as an amusing novelty. A pilgrimage is not necessarily and in se a penitential undertaking; contemporary English custom makes of it rather a comfortable conducted tour; the Catholic Association at Christmas hit the mean, so that their 380 representatives of Great Britain and Ireland, having the right spirit, found the right conditions and could call themselves pilgrims without an incredulous grin.

There were no hardships—but there was heroism, for not all the travellers were young and strong. There were many old folk and some in bad health, to whom hard seats and full carriages and sleepless nights were far more than a mere passing irksomeness. Their patience and devotion are to be remembered with humility, rather than to be written about with fulsomeness.

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 Fidèle, 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 approach this subject much in the spirit in which Tertullian wrote against the heretics of his day. We might adapt the words of the powerful, if acrimonious, apologist. ‘We must first see to whom the Saints belong lest they be claimed by those who have no right to them.’ As the gnostics of Tertullian’s day claimed a right to the Scriptures, so the agnostics and other misguided folks of our day claim St. Francis. As the self-constituted teachers of those days interpreted Scripture according to their own fancy, and suppressed such parts of it as did not please them, so modern non-Catholics admire their own views in St. Francis and shut their eyes to those aspects of his personality—often fundamental aspects—which do not fit in with their views. I wish to summarise in a rough way the recent non-Catholic appreciations of the Poverello. Furthermore, I would like to make Catholics grasp that St. Francis is theirs: that he is a product of the supernatural vitality of Christ’s Church : and that if non-Catholics admire him, they must do so from afar, preferably in sackcloth and ashes. You can only really imitate St. Francis in loving the birds and flowers, if you have fasted with him on Mount Alverna, and approached Confession and Communion at his side. Let Mr. Sidney Dark close this paragraph for me: