Our conception of mental illness has undergone a great change during the last half-century and many old misconceptions have been discarded. Lunacy, a purely legal term, which corresponds to no medical diagnosis, has slipped into the background and mental illness is recognised as a wide range of conditions of varying seriousness about which there is a growing body of knowledge and for which, to an increasing extent, appropriate treatment can be given.

The effect of this change is striking. Early in the century the only recognised provision for mental illness was to be found in hospitals known as lunatic asylums, which were administered under the 1890 Lunacy Act. These hospitals were designed for and restricted to persons who, owing to their mental condition, were incapabe of managing their own affairs and who, for their own safety or that of others, needed to be placed under care and treatment. Treatment was legally provided for, but in practice the emphasis was on care and protection, and since admission to hospital meant the deprivation of the patient’s liberty it followed naturally that elaborate provision was made for the prevention of abuse. It followed equally naturally that relatives and friends were reluctant to invoke the Act. The result was that the only hospitals able to provide resident treatment were closed to many who would gladly have taken advantage of it, and the Lunacy Act became only too often a barrier to treatment.

High up in the Vosges, crowning a mountain, stands the sanctuary of Ste Odile. Below there stretches the immense plain of the Lower Rhine, with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral rising in the middle distance. For thirteen hundred years, amidst all the conflicts that have marked the history of Alsace, it has remained a point of rest. It was here, at the end of October, that there took place the third International Liturgical Conference sponsored by the Liturgical Institute of Trier and the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique of Paris. There could have been no more appropriate meeting-place for a work of reconciliation, for such is the purpose of these gatherings bringing together liturgical scholars and pastoral clergy from ten different countries, all alike concerned to render more effective the redemptive work of Christ which the Liturgy exists to declare and continue.

Previous meetings at Luxembourg and Maria-Laach had evoked the sympathetic interest of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Indeed the text of the restored Paschal Vigil issued in 1950 may be said to be a triumphant vindication, of the work of liturgical reform, and that precisely in the direction of the conference’s own efforts. For the Or do Sabbati Sancti is not just a piece of liturgical scholarship, designed to restore with archaeological accuracy a rite whose significance had been largely lost. It is all that, but much more is it a bold attempt to make the liturgical action a mystery in which the Christian people share. Hence the emphasis on a reduction and a simplification of the symbolism of the rite, so that the central theme of death and resurrection, darkness and light, may stand revealed in all its strength. Hence, too, the provision that the congregation should at this point of the Christian mystery, and in their own language, renew the baptismal vows which the Paschal rite enshrines.

The ‘ordinary Christian’ who is attracted by the magnetism of the ‘mystics’ is baffled by a problem that is hard to solve from a scrutiny of the lives of some of these contemplative saints, either because, like the Fathers of the Desert, they are virtually unknown to us in any intimate sense, or because their natural personalities, before their supernatural development takes place, do not appear to have experienced the need out of which this problem arises. A Saint Rose of Lima, for example, or a Saint Mariana of Quito, seem, from the usual accounts of them at least, to have had that capacity for living in an almost vacuum, the incapacity for which on the part of most people constitutes the problem here in question. St John of the Cross preaches his nada, and the admiring but ordinary Christian feels that even supposing he had the courage to deny self so consistently, how in fact would he carry out the programme of annihilation short of, in fact, ascending to the top of a very tall column and quietly settling down to starve? A temperament really directed to love of creatures, however many ounces of ash are sprinkled upon the dish of spinach, will always leap forward to delight in the grey and green colour-scheme. Solitude can never be absolute, and the Romanus who brings the hermit his food will surely be rewarded with his love. Is it possible to examine the lives of any mystics in sufficient detail to discover whether there is a solution to this difficulty, and even one which the ordinary man may, in due proportion, make his own?

Marxism is undeniably the most powerful challenge to religion of our time, if not of all time. When we have estimated the enormous military might which Marxist governments and parties now have at their disposal, the vast material resources, the huge proportions of the earth’s surface, the teeming millions of human beings at their command, we have only begun to estimate its power. Indeed, if we think of these alone we have not so much as begun to assess its inner strength, and we are already on the way to be the victims of its own materialistic ideology. We have to understand the fascination which has enabled it to gather to itself even this material might. When all has been said of the brutality of its leaders, of secret police and labour camps, of denunciations and purges and liquidations, the fact must be faced that Marxist Communism inspires in millions a conviction, a faith and a hope, an enthusiasm and self-abnegation, a sense of release and of solidarity—which even the Pope, in his Christmas Allocution, contrasted with the bewildered disillusion of youth in the ‘free world’. Perhaps even more impressive than the devotion it can arouse in its party-line conformists, is the agony of genuine remorse it can produce (as Koesder and others have told us) in the renegades, the purged and the liquidated themselves.

Whence this power and fascination; Perhaps its greatest danger lies in the fact that it is so litde felt and understood by most of those who oppose it. Marxism is labelled materialistic; and we tend to dismiss it as some drab positivist theory which can see no further than solids, liquids and gases. This is not the time to expound, let alone to criticise, the intricacies of Dialectical Materialism.

The publication of the ‘Life’ of Father Bede Jarrett by Kenneth Wykeham-George, O.P., and Gervase Mathew, OP. (Blackfriars Publications; 12s. 6d.) is an event of more than usual significance for this review, of which Fr Bede was the founder and for a time the Editor. Readers of Blackfriars will scarcely need the recommendations of reviewers to draw their attention to the biography of the Dominican whose inspiration was so important in the early and difficult days of this journal’s career. We are fortunate in being able to publish the tributes of two of his friends, Sir Ernest Barker and Fr C. C. Martindale, S.J., occasioned by the appearance of his biography and a reminder, eighteen years after his death, of the extent of his true achievement. sir ernest barker writes:

Many memories came back to my mind as I read Father Wykeham-George’s and Father Mathew’s Life of Bede Jarrett. I was carried back nearly fifty years, to the year 1904. (or was it 1905?) when he became my pupil and read with me for Honours in the School of Modern History. The way it happened was this. I had had for some time a connection with the Benedictine house of residence (then called Hunter-Blair’s Hall), and I had taught some of the Benedictines—not least Father Paul Nevill, now and for many years past the Headmaster of Ampleforth College. The Benedictines—as has been their wont for nearly 1,500 years—were hospitable; and their Hall in Oxford was the hospitium of members of other Orders. One of the ‘guests’, or rather members, of Hunter-Blair’s Hall was Father Bede Jarrett; and that was how he became my pupil, two years after Father Paul Nevill. He read with me down to the year 1907, when he took his Schools and was placed high in the First Class. (I was one of the examiners that year, and I was proud of the sustained excellence of his work.) It was a very good year, both among the men and the women students: Lord Eustace Percy was another man who was placed in the first class, and among the women was Professor Ada Levett, as she afterwards became, whom I had also taught for a little time in her student days.

During the last half-century, industry has increasingly recognised that it is actively and directly concerned with the education and training of all who look to it for a career. Many in industry today have jobs with little intrinsic value in them, done often solely for the wages alone. These men and women neither like what they do nor do what they like. Now a few are realising that no political or economic rearrangement will remove that attitude to work: we shall have to rediscover, with Eric Gill, that ‘the artist is not a special kind of man but every man is a special kind of artist’. Perhaps then we may restore to work a sense of worthwhileness and find the desire once again to make well whatever needs to be made, and the humility and confidence to do the seemingly little things superlatively well.

During the last five years, firms, industries, associations, universities, colleges and government departments have individually, or in varying forms of collaboration, made large plans for the education of those associated with industry. Thousands of education and training officers have appeared and innumerable courses and handbooks of every description prepared.