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.

One of the incidents of the Strike was the suppression of some of the big newspapers and the curtailment of all of them. The news was most scanty at the very time when, from hour to hour, everyone was eager for bulletins. In the more remote parts of the country the disorganised postal services prevented even the arrival of the meagre sheet that did service for the morning paper; and those people who had not access to the wireless were left mostly in the dark. Most of the journalists were silenced by the the stoppage of the printing machines; and those writers who could have their say were, owing to the abnormal conditions, reduced to a brevity of utterance and a terseness of expression more often met with in the writings of the mediaeval philosophers than in the outpourings of the philosophers of Fleet Street. The wireless and the stump orator came into their own. The former, we suspected, from its reticence about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s peace appeal, was being controlled on some principle of artificial selection; and the latter gave us views rather than news. The British public, which is often accused of relying with a too slavish trust upon its press, found that it had to live through a very trying time without the light and leading that comes from the printed word —or, at least, with very little of it. The powerful Daily Maildisappeared before the strike began. Some say that its disappearance was the occasion if not the cause of things being brought to a head.

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.

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 World of William Clissold Mr. H. G. Wells warns his readers against attributing to the author the views of his characters. It is as if Mr. Wells should say : ‘Don’t, please, blame me for what William Clissold says or believes or does. I am not Mr. Clissold : I am his creator. You don’t blame the Creator for the deeds, misdeeds, beliefs and misbeliefs of his creatures : therefore, don’t hold me responsible for the antics and opinions of the creatures of my imagination.’ Mr. Wells’s actual words are: ‘His (Clissold’s) views run very close at times—but not always—to the views his author has in his own person expressed; nevertheless, is it too much to ask that they should be treated here as his own?’

This ingenious method of gagging the critics will be taken no more seriously than Mr. Wells either expects or deserves. When, for instance, his Mr. Clissold utters libels and blasphemies against the Church and paints sordid pictures of Catholic priests, is not Mr. Wells asking too much if he expects us to say : ‘Oh : that’s Clissold, you know, not Wells; and their views only run close at times—not always’ ? If a showman at the fair were to change the ordinary use of one of his ‘Aunt Sallys,’ and were to use it as an offensive weapon with which to hit the heads of his fellow citizens, it is not at all improbable that the wrath of the citizens would be aroused and directed principally (as the Scholastics would say) against the showman and only secondarily against the Aunt Sally.

The Holy Father has drawn the attention of all the faithful to Mexico by his appeal for prayers for the Church in that truly distressful land.

What exactly is happening in Mexico? The difficulty in answering this question arises not from lack of matter, but from the confused inability to sort out the overwhelming mass of information that has come from different sources. American and Canadian newspapers and reviews, representing the concern of people who are nearer the scene of all the trouble, are our chief informants, though it seems our own Press is beginning to take notice since we have an article on Mexico in The Times for April 21st.

For the ordinary Englishman, with a taste for reading, Mexico is always associated with the valiant Cortés, whose exploits are cherished memories of our boyhood reading and are familiar to all who have read Prescott’s classic work. Mexico, which presented to Cortés its difficulties in the shape of orgies of human sacrifice, seems now to demand another Cortes to deal with orgies of another kind.

The Faith, planted by the Spanish missionaries who followed in the wake of the conquerors, took firm root; and in the three hundred years of Spanish influence a real Catholic tradition was formed and fostered, so that to-day ninety-nine per cent, of the entire population are said to be Catholic. Racially, the people are mixed. Of its fifteen million inhabitants, six million are pure-blooded Indians, one million pure-blooded Spaniards or Castilian Creoles, and eight million are Mestizos—the offspring of mixed Spanish and American-Indian parentage.

Blackfriars in this December number devotes its pages to St. Francis, whose memory the world has been cherishing in a special way during the present year, exactly seven centuries since his death. The Church by solemn proclamation and festive reminder has declared Francis to be the ‘Alter Christus,’ the perfectly Christ-like man. Italy has made him a national hero and non-Catholics have sounded his praises. Among all the centenaries, whether religious or secular, that the last few years have produced, none has been more universally popular than this. It is strange that a man should win applause by running away from it and achieve popularity by seeking the next world rather than this. It makes one inclined to think better of our world and age when we find so many unexpected people on their knees before St. Francis : we know not what to do with those convenient labels, ‘materialism,’ ‘commercialism,’ and ‘unchecked greed,’ when we see the world running after Holy Poverty. Some of the worshippers are perhaps in love with the right thing for the wrong reason. The preacher to the birds is remembered more readily than the Francis who strove to overcome with his eloquence the stubborn hearts of men : the wolf of Gubbio is more romantic than the wolf nearer home—the man who is wolf to his fellow man; and Franciscan simplicity is a sterner thing than ‘the simple life. Yet whatever brings men to the feet of St. Francis cannot but have some element of good in it; and can we not leave Francis to deal with those who seek him?

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.

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.

I will deal with it under two headings: (1) Is it desirable? (2) Is it feasible?

(1) Is it desirable?

It is scarcely conceivable that any Catholic should be found to answer ‘No’ to this, but the arguments in favour of its desirability are so powerful that their consideration may lend strength to those who would hesitate on the question of feasibility.

The average man unconsciously forms his outlook on life very largely from the columns of his daily paper.

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.

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.

The attitude of this ex-Ambassador towards the peace policy of the Holy See is not only characteristic of what most Englishmen of his orthodox and official type of mind felt throughout the war and still feel. It is worth examining more closely because Sir Rennell Rodd, who enjoyed unique advantages for ascertaining and understanding the pacific efforts of the Vatican throughout the war, failed completely to understand what Pope Benedict XV was striving to accomplish.

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:

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.

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.