It is safe to say that the new conception of the University Apostolate, outlined in papal pronouncements and in the deliberations of Pax Romana, the international organisation for Catholic graduates and undergraduates of the universities of the world, constitutes one of the most important aspects of Catholic Action in our age. This article does not concern the Catholic Universities but solely those of the ancient secularised or the modem ‘red-brick’ variety which share the same fundamental problems. For they lack the integrity—to use Newman’s own expression—which the Church alone can give them. There is no need to diagnose the problem more fully than that, for in this age of introspection it is generally recognised. There is an ever-increasing concern, for example, over the dangers of specialisation. There is a general recognition of the fact that true university education is in danger of being lost in the pursuit of technicalism. The high-blown pride of secularisation has broken under it and there is a chastened search for the right solution.

The Church therefore has a tremendous opportunity in the middle years of this century, for her role is no longer a merely defensive one. As Cardinal Pizzardo said at Mariastein in 1949: ‘Pax Romana today can no longer limit itself—after the manner of old-fashioned Catholic Action—to protecting Catholic university people against the dangers of their environment; it must on the contrary develop in them a spirit of apostolate and conquest.’ The present Pope, speaking to the men of Italian Catholic Action in September 1947, said: ‘Not only defence but conquest. ... He who limits himself to being always on the defensive, slowly loses ground.. . . Do not isolate yourselves... . Imitate the Christians of the first centuries! Only thus, through ever-renewed action and penetration in the pagan world can the Church grow and make progress.’ And Cardinal Suhard, the late Archbishop of Paris, outlined this new approach in his now world-famous pastoral letters. It is summed up in those catch-phrases: the apostolate of ‘like to like’ and of ‘community to community’.

This year happens to mark a double centenary of Newman, that of his Discourses on the Idea of a University in Dublin, and that of his Sermon on the Second Spring. But we do not need the excuse of a centenary to speak about Newman. Rarely, if ever, has it happened in the course of history that the interest in a man’s personality and appreciation of his importance as a thinker have grown so fast and spread to so many countries as has been the case since the 1920’s with regard to Newman. Before 1920 his was a great name, perhaps the greatest name of the nineteenth century, certainly the greatest since the Reformation as a religious thinker; but he had suffered the misfortune of being ‘adopted’ by modernists and immanentists, and had been so widely misinterpreted by men as brilliant and seemingly authoritative as Bremond, that his present triumphal progress must have been unthinkable. In 1929, when I presented a thesis to Fribourg University on his Essay on Development., many there were who warned me that it was a dangerous subject to choose. No less a man than Cardinal Lepicier, who incidentally had read Newman widely, had uncompromisingly accused him of heresy in the Essay on Development and the Grammar of Assent. I remember thinking I could justify my hardihood by the consideration that, where cardinals disagree and neither is condemned, it could not be disrespecful to defend one against the other.

It may seem odd to count the psychology of C. G. Jung as a challenge to religion. It is more usual to complain that, as Freud doffed the physician’s coat for the professor’s gown, so Jung, still more incongruously, has assumed the clergyman’s surplice—if not the robes of the magician, the prophet, the mystagogue. Yet I think that the friendliness of Jung presents a far more serious and radical challenge to religion as we know it than did ever the hostility of Freud.

For Freud, religion was an obsessional neurosis. For Jung it seems to be rather the absence of religion that is at the root of most present-day neurosis among adults. Already in 1932 he wrote: ‘During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. . . . Among all my patients in the second half of life (that is to say, over thirty-five) there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers.’

How did it come about, this diametrically opposite evaluation of religion—by two psychologists who once worked together in close harmony and considerable mutual admiration? Their early differences, on the surface at least, had nothing whatever to do with religion or philosophy. Jung was every bit as sceptical of both as was Freud. Theirs were wholly professional differences, concerned with the interpretation of actual psychological facts, and with what was, and was not, therapeutically successful.

The coming rift was already visible in Jung’s Wandltmgen und Symbole der Libido, written in 1911. Jung still accepted, even stressed, Freud’s ideas about the origin, and the illusoriness, of religion. But he recognised that traditional religious beliefs and practices (whatever else they may have been) had in fact functioned as a sort of mass-therapy, or at least as a preventive against the sort of neuroses that afflict modem man.

This year sees the fiftieth anniversary of the death at Tegernsee of Lord Acton, and the anniversary has been commemorated by the publication of two books, one adding to the small collection of Acton’s works in book form—now all out of print—and the other an analysis of his political philosophy. The only work of Acton published in his lifetime, apart from occasional essays in innumerable reviews both British and foreign, was his inaugural lecture, on The Study of History, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895. After his death, friends and disciples collected various lectures and essays into four volumes, and these, together with some incomplete collections of letters, are all that has been left to us of the man who was acclaimed in the latter half of the nineteenth century as being the most erudite in Europe. The more welcome then is the book of Essays on Church and State which is the first volume of what is to be a complete edition of Acton’s works. These essays have been chosen by Mr Douglas Woodruff, assisted by Mr Roland Hill, from Acton’s contributions to those short-lived but impressive reviews of the 1860’s, The Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review, and were all written when Acton was in his thirties. To this volume Mr Woodruff contributes an introduction whose chief merit is to tell the story of these reviews, of how the effort of the laity came to grief in its first attempt at a lay apostolate of the Press.

It is rather more than thirty years since Dr G. G. Coulton inaugurated the series of ‘Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’. In the interval between the two great wars a number of notable books appeared, including Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries and Coulton’s own monumental Five Centuries of Religion, of which the recently-published posthumous volume appropriately terminated the series. It is now revived, under the general editorship of the Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge, ‘to present as a single collection some of the work submitted for higher degrees or fellowships by young Cambridge medievalists’. Thus it will provide in some sense a parallel to the Oxford Historical Series.

The first two volumes to appear in the new series are both studies of ecclesiastical estates, and so carry on the tradition established by the late R. A. L. Smith in his Canterbury Cathedral Priory. Mr Edward Miller’s subject is the abbey and bishopric of Ely; while Mr H. P. R. Finberg writes on Tavistock Abbey. In both cases, however, the ecclesiastical is strictly subordinate to the ‘social’ interest.

Mr Miller makes no excursions into the field of diocesan administration, but defines his aim as ‘to draw out of the records of the Church of Ely some deductions about the progress of the lordship exercised by the abbots and bishops of Ely, and about the influence they exercised upon those fragments of medieval society which they had some real power to shape’. Mr Finberg, as he tells us in his preface, is concerned with Tavistock less as a community of men dedicated to the religious life than as ‘an economic unit, a property-owning organisation, a producer and consumer’, seen against the background of that part of Devon in which the estates of the abbey lay.

Monsignor Hudson of Coleshill worked out a neat equation which is still valid for religious engaged in social work: ‘A religious vocation’, he said, ‘is good, efficiency is also good, but the two together equal perfection’. He was one of the pioneers of the training of religious in orthopaedics. It is interesting to reflect that religious communities devoted to nursing and education have no particular difficulty in submitting their subjects for training in accordance with State regulations, and the fruits of this policy are to be seen in our nursing homes and hospitals as well as in our schools and training colleges.

In other sections of social work, whether for example for the old or for children, the need to develop a particular technique and submit to training is only now coming into prominence. We have come to realise, rather late in the day maybe, that the mere housing of people, good as an emergency measure, is only the beginning of the problem of adequate care. It has been taken for granted that anyone, particularly any religious, was adequate to meet the needs of the case. But today we are being brought to realise that something more is needed if we are to achieve effective work and that there is no contradiction between training and religious vocation. A moment’s reflection shows that religious teachers and religious nurses are none the less good religious, perhaps even better, because they are good teachers or good nurses, and similarly in all other sections of social work there need be no antagonism between professional proficiency and religious vocation.

In spite of a steady tradition in the official documents of the Church, there has long existed, and still persists, much vagueness about the aims of the Missions. This has its ill-effects on the methods and on the missionaries themselves, and on the support given to the Missions by the Church at large. A clear view of the matter is therefore of the first importance.

The encyclical, Evangelii praecones, of Pius XII, issued on June 2nd, 1951, and that of his predecessor, Rerum Ecclesiae (of which the first commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary), have given powerful directives in regard to Missions, and their prescriptions should remove many misconceptions. A more precise theology of the Missions is in the course of development, namely a branch of theology dealing with the expansion of the visible Church.

The fact which dominates the whole subject of Missions must be the purpose for which they are undertaken. Missionary activity is not synonymous with deep religious conviction as such, for there are many religions which have the character of a closed national or caste group, not easily permitting expansion beyond its limits. Such are most primitive religions, and some others such as Hinduism. Catholic Missions have a definite aim, and this has been stated clearly in the recent encyclical: ‘As everyone knows, these sacred expeditions have as their principal aim to bring the light of Christian truth more clearly to new peoples, to gain new Christians. The ultimate goal which they must strive to reach, and which must always be kept before the mind, is that of establishing the Church solidly among other peoples, and of giving it a hierarchy chosen from among the indigenous population.’ The establishment of the visible Church is the aim of the Missions.

In my last talk I drew attention to some of the striking similarities between—on the one hand—the traditional Christian rites of Holy Week, and several incidents in the Gospel narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, and—on the other hand—the so-called pattern of the Dying and Rising God which emerged largely as the result of Frazer’s researches in The Golden Bough. Fifty years or so ago, it seems to have been widely supposed that these discoveries of similarity between Christian and pagan mysteries, collected by scholars like Robertson Smith and Frazer, popularised in tendentious paper-backs by writers like Grant Allen, somehow made nonsense of Christianity. And it must be admitted that they did make nonsense of a great many nineteenth-century ideas about Christianity; at least they made it impossible to regard it just as some sort of transcendental ethic, dropped ready-made from the sky, without roots in the earth, in history, without relevance to the basic and perennial needs of human society and the human psyche, or to the forms and forces that shape them. But I remember when, as a boy, I read one of those books published by the Rationalist Press, it had just the opposite effect on me to that intended. The Christian Scriptures and the Catholic rites to which I was accustomed, without losing their wonted sense, gained a quality and a sense of which my pastors and catechisms had told me nothing: a sense of solidarity with creation, with the processes of nature, with the cycles of the seasons. Dramatisations of the processes of vegetation they might be, but had not Christ himself drawn the analogy between the Christian self-sacrifice and the grain of wheat which must die if it is to bear fruit?

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.

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.

Perhaps Frazer’s own theories about the origin and development of religion hardly constitute a present-day challenge of any sort. There is ample evidence that he grew increasingly dissatisfied with them himself, and few students of the subject today would care to subscribe to them as adequate to account for all the facts—even for all the facts which he himself collected, let alone the enormous quantity which have been gathered since his time. It is not, however, of Frazer’s own theories in particular, or even of his own findings, that I propose to speak; I take his name rather as a symbol, for it is that of the leading representative of the widespread dissemination of the comparative study of religion. Comparative religion was studied before Frazer, and it has been studied since. Yet it was Frazer’s great work, more than any other, which aroused the interest of non-specialists. Jane Harrison recalls how, ‘Among my own contemporaries J. G. Frazer was soon to light the dark world of savage superstition with a gleam from The Golden Bough. The happy title of that great book ... made it arrest the attention of scholars.... Tylor had written and spoken; Robertson Smith had seen the Star in the East; in vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes; but at the mere sound of the magical words “Golden Bough’’ the scales fell—we heard and understood.’ But it was not only to classical scholars that Frazer’s work opened new worlds; and soon it was to become common knowledge that the beliefs and practices of Christian Europe were by no means so peculiar and unique as had been commonly assumed. A nodding acquaintance, at least, with other people’s religions became part of the equipment of any educated man.

Even before his accession King James is said to have given a verbal promise to Thomas Percy, the future conspirator, that the Catholics would be granted some degree of liberty. There is, in the very nature of things, no written evidence of this promise, and the King later denied having given it, but the Catholics firmly believed that some assurance of toleration had been given. But by the beginning of 1604 all hope of toleration for papists was gone. On 19 February, James I protested ‘his utter detestation of their superstitious religion, and that he was so far from favouring it, as if he thought his son and heir after him would give any toleration thereunto, he would wish him fairly buried before his eyes’. And fairly buried he was in 1612.

On 22 February, 1604, a proclamation was issued ordering all Jesuits and seminary priests to depart the kingdom before 19 March. On the same day the fine of £20 a month for recusancy was again put in force, and was made to include the whole period since the King’s coming, thus negativing what little relief had been granted.

On 24 April, a bill was introduced in the lower house, classing Catholics with forgers, perjurers and outlaws, and disabling them from sitting in parliament, while an ‘Act for the due execution of the statutes against Jesuits, seminary priests and recusants’ made in this session, not only reenforced all the laws made in Elizabeth’s reign but even added to their severity. On the third reading of this bill Viscount Montague courageously denounced it, and the following day found himself in the Fleet for his ‘scandalous and offensive speech’. Further proclamations followed and on 16 July the bloody persecution broke out again when John Sugar, a priest, and Robert Grissold his servant, were executed at Warwick.

The members of a Committee of the British Medical Association, in giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, have recendy made proposals to add new grounds for divorce. The surprising thing is not the audacity of these marriage reformers, but their timidity. If it is true that the ancient Christian institution, in all its rigidity, is out of date and unworkable in the modern world, then the new circumstances should be studied and really sweeping changes made. The alarming increase in divorce makes it abundandy clear that all this tinkering with the ancient institution does not make it more workable, but less workable. And yet it is to preserve the institution that the changes are made. The committee say that they wish to stress the necessity for ‘permanent and stable partnerships in marriage’, and maintain ‘that the greatest possible number of sound family units is essential to the nation s health and wellbeing’, and would support ‘every effort to ensure that marriage as an institution is both stable and permanent’. Without wishing to call in question their sincerity, it must be pointed out that it can only be utter confusion of mind and blindness to the realities that can lead people, who value marriage for what it should be, to take steps that have produced, and will produce, results that are the exact opposite of their hopes. Marriage is indivisible. On no grounds whatever is there any sense or soundness in trying to make it more permanent and stable for some by making it less permanent and stable for others. They are only two views that have any prima facie case for consideration, and the ‘easier divorce’ policy is not one of them.

If there is a ‘problem’ of adapting or accommodating African rites and beliefs to Christianity, it is one to which missionaries best know the answers. Students of primitive people are better employed in saying what does happen, rather than in speculating as to what might or should happen. The problem posed in theory, in which abstract African rites and beliefs encounter an abstract Christian teaching, can scarcely be the problem which has to be answered daily in practice. This impersonal encounter between two abstractions then becomes a very personal encounter between two people, one Christian, one pagan. Each is held to his religion by something more than the arguments he could produce for it; while the Christian may sometimes find himself nearer to the pagan than his arguments against him suggest. The difference between them makes for uneasiness, if only because it will not remain constant. Christianity and paganism, in the abstract, have a clear line of division, beyond which they are not required to meet on equal terms. A Christian and a pagan, two individuals, cannot so easily remain each on his own side of a formal division. They are bound to feel the strain of sometimes seeming to belong to different worlds, while at other times belonging so palpably to the same. I think that to try to find common ‘human’ ground between them is to misconceive the difference. This common human ground, in so far as the expression means anything, is given, in the first place. Christian and pagan are not like two slices of bread, one spread with butter and the other with margarine. To start to look for common human ground—human which is neither human-Christian nor human-pagan—is to reject what is immediately there. It is at once to make the relationship between Christian and pagan into a problem, not a relationship.

It is a feature of much contemporary philosophical writing that an amateur of the literature finds himself unable even to think he understands it because of the extent to which the writers draw on the technicalities of modem logic. Usually such a reader does not know where to turn for enlightenment, and very frequently on being given some references to introductory books he finds himself baffled by an austere and technical exposition of the very technicalities that he wishes to understand. These few pages contain some preliminary remarks addressed only to such investigators.

Formal logic is, and so far as it has remained true to itself, always has been, an exact science. The syllogism, we once heard a theologian remark, is not an essay in vers libre. There are indeed degrees of exactness. Aristotle, who founded the science so far as concerns its European development, laid it down as a principle that phrases equivalent in significance should be interchangeable, but what phrases these might be is left to be discovered from Iris usage and forms no part of his system. We find for instance the sentence ‘all medicine is science’ treated as a substitution in the scheme for a sentence ‘B belongs to all A’ it having been stated that ‘A’ is to be replaced by ‘medicine’ and ‘B’ by ‘science’. Correct substitution produces ‘science belongs to all medicine’, and we are left to infer that Aristotle deemed this equivalent to ‘all medicine is science’. Modem standards of exactness are more demanding. A modem logician would have stated the interchangeability of ‘B belongs to all A’ with ‘All A is B’, if he desired to have both modes of expression in his system.

Social work might be described as the natural human response of one human being to another who asks for help, and case-work is a (very inadequate) name for the attempt to give the individual person in trouble the individual remedy he requires. A ‘case-worker’ is the substitute for the ‘good neighbour’ of a simpler society. In a small community the good neighbour steps in during a crisis with advice and help, able to provide an objective point of view, and ready to step out again when no longer needed, without disturbing the fundamental independence of the person concerned. In a community where everyone knows each other and social ties are firmly knit, this works very well; it was not till the growth of industry and the development of large towns where rich and poor were segregated into different areas that the system broke down.

The social workers of the nineteenth century found themselves complete strangers in experience and outlook to the people they were trying to help. To be the good neighbours they desired to be—intimate, wise, accepted friends— they had to evolve a technique based on principles which would enable them to help without patronage or sentimentality. They called this technique ‘case-work’. It came into being in 1869 with the Charity Organisation Society (now the Family Welfare Association) from which all other family case-work societies have developed.

For good or for ill there is every chance that the Labour Party will control the destiny of this country for perhaps fifty out of the next hundred years, and as it is a party that attracts strong support from a large proportion of the Catholics in this country it is important to think of the position of these Catholics within it. In the major industrial centres the majority of Catholics in the working class support Labour; indeed, it was once estimated in the columns of this review by Lord Pakenham that eighty per cent of the Catholic body voted Labour, and even if we agree that this figure is high, the percentage must still be very significant.

Unfortunately most of those Catholics with the ability to write and to project their ideas into the world of thought and of literature tend to be supporters of the Conservative Party, and they in no way represent the general opinion of the Catholic body. When one moves at what might be called the national level of Catholic action one finds that most of the leaders are also Conservative. No one can doubt the right of these writers or leaders to follow the politics they hold, nor can one doubt their ability to write and their ability to give time to the leadership of the Catholic body. They accomplish a magnificent job for the Catholic community, yet it is unfortunate that so one-sided an impression is given of the Catholic attitude towards our political parties.

When we try to make contact, for the purpose of teaching and explaining the faith, with the pagan mind of our generation, something we might call ‘scientific mindedness’ at once arises as a barrier. (The inverted commas are strictly necessary.) We are not speaking of the truly scientific attitude but of a by-product, to be found both among scientists and among those several removes away from any field of scientific research. I do not mean by ‘scientific mindedness’ simply the attitude that demands tangible proof for every assertion made. Neither do I mean actual knowledge of recent scientific discoveries and theories, requiring particular answers to particular objections. The difficulty is really one of basic mental patterns. The more we are pre-occupied, as Christians, with the truths of revelation, the more these truths will determine the shape of our thinking and our approach to all questions, not only doctrinal ones. The unbeliever is not, of course, so shaped in his mind. But this naturally does not mean that his mind has no determinate shape. The basic mental patterns of the unbelievers of our day are, as we all know, to a large extent laid down by ideas stemming from the scientific discoveries and theories of die last hundred years. It does not matter that a particular individual has perhaps read very litde, even in popular works, of what these discoveries and dieories actually are. He absorbs his mental outlook from them none the less.

But the fact that his actual knowledge is probably slight deprives him of the riches of the scientific outlook, its humility before facts and its acute realisation of its own limitations, and leaves him with illegitimate by-products—a vague assumption of materialism, a vague conviction of the near-omniscience and nearomnipotence of ‘scientists’, and a vague certainty that practically every teaching that has not come directly from ‘the scientists’ has at some time, somehow, been discredited and disproved by them. Against this background we try to trace the truths of revelation.

A Reviewer in the August number of Theology has written that ‘Rome’s tragic rejection of the Ecumenical Movement is one of the challenges of our day, and it has yet to be faced and met’. By its context, a review of Salmon’s Infallibility of the Church, this rather cryptic sentence seems to imply that the nature of the Church (as Catholics conceive it) makes Catholicism essentially incapable of absorbing the spirit of Ecumenism. If that were actually the case it would be truer to say that Ecumenism rejects Rome, not that Rome has rejected the Ecumenical Movement.

In order to test the validity of this judgment it is necessary to define what constitutes the essential spirit of Ecumenism, and what are the aims to which it gives birth. But it is precisely here that a difficulty lies, because the Ecumenical Movement has been fluid in its development, originating in a spontaneous desire for Christian unity, due partly to the threat of world war during the first decade of the century, and partly to the problems set to missionary effort by divisions among Christians. The double source of the desire for unity resulted in the emergence of two tendencies within the growing movement. In one, emphasis was laid upon co-operation between Christian bodies, in spite of differences of doctrine.

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.’