Ignorance is one of the greatest evils. It is often the cause of great harm in both the moral and physical spheres. Especially one can note this in the sphere of the social problems. Ignorance is an important factor in helping class hatred.

After the Paris Commune a lay brother of the Vincentians pointed this out to two members of the French aristocracy and in doing so helped to change their lives.

The three were inspecting the ruins of palaces when Brother Maurice turned to the others and said, “It is you who have amused yourselves within these palaces now in ruins: you who pass by without seeing the people, without knowing them or their thoughts or characters, or caring for their needs and their sufferings, it is you who are the real culprits.”

It is a dangerous thing to describe the present in terms of the past. The pontificate of Pius XI is not yet history; nor are we sufficiently removed from certain great political events in which the Holy See has been involved in the last fifteen years, to judge them without passion and with due proportion. Mr. Teeling has made an ambitious attempt to describe and to account for the apparent trend of Vatican diplomacy, which, especially since the beginning of the Abyssinian war, has been the object of so much unflattering attention in this country. In so doing he has sought to place this prickly subject in its proper setting by describing the manifold moral, political and social problems with which the Catholic Church is confronted in every part of the world. It is a cross between history and guess-work; but it is not without value to non-Catholic readers for whom the book seems to be mainly intended. On balance it may be that it will do more good than harm in those circles where ignorance of the immensity and complexity of the Church's task is as monumental as is, on the other hand, that Catholic prejudice which the author has so rashly challenged.

The Catholic is aware of his solidarity with all men, aware too that in the sacrifice of Christ the whole of human history presses upon our present immolation and oblation for the achievement of Christ’s kingdom. It is certain that in being dead to ourselves we may become channels of the Church's redemptive action upon the body of mankind. We know first of all that what God now demands of us is not that which we possess but that for which Christ died. Nothing can be restored to Christ that does not belong to Him already. Our vision of the boundaries of the Church’s redemptive action has extended beyond the saving of our isolated souls to include all existence. And the boundaries of our own action are also extended. We do not have to prove before God the precise relation of our action to its effects, but our action, however partial and limited, is a participation and formulation of mankind’s supplication to the mercy and the victory of Christ.

If we are that grain of wheat which, falling to the ground, has not flinched to die, our fruit is com where men are hungriest and where the poor and the stranger come to glean. To bring the simile into terms of living, this losing of our life that we may gain it is a twofold supplication and identification. Firstly it is that death to self which through the agony and crucifixion is the identification of ourselves in Christ, and the supplication of God for a no less universal intention than that for which Christ died. So much is true of ourselves in so far as there is supernatural life in us.

All English Catholics will be rejoiced that His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster is to be raised to the Cardinalate in the forthcoming Consistory; for it is something greater than a personal honour, since he is the representative of English Catholicism in the Universal Church.

The unity of the Church has never implied a barren uniformity among nations. It is one of the miracles of Catholic life that the acceptance of a common rule and of a single Faith has only emphasized national traits and diversity of cultures; grace has strengthened nature, not destroyed it. It is something some than a coincidence that in our own time Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism have all found leaders in the only vitally international society upon earth. While looking back through the past of which we are ourselves the heirs we come to realise it as a unity. Ullathorne, Milner, Challoner, St. Thomas More, all are linked not merely by a common purpose but by the means through which that purpose was achieved. Their lifeworks were only phases in a continuous tradition marked by an indomitable loyalty to the Holy See and an ineradicable Englishry. It would be naive to assert that our own tradition is necessarily better than others. It would be disloyal to forget that it is our own. It is right that we should rejoice when it is to be once more represented, and so fitly represented, in the Sacred College.

We Christians of 1937 are the spectators of a terrible drama, a drama which confronts our consciences with agonizing problems. This drama is the disastrous struggle for power between two rival complex ideologies which have come to be known as “Right” and “Left.” Already this conflict is sapping the life-blood of Spain; already it is breeding rancour and hatred of brother for brother throughout the civilized world, and threatens the very foundations of civilization with irreparable disaster.

Elsewhere (in my Lettre sur l’Indépendance) I have sketched some of the characteristic traits which seem to me, as a student of philosophy and of current political trends, to be the distinguishing features of “Right” and “Left.”

To those observations one might add that in concrete experience, which is for the most part in actual fact an experience of misrepresentation (for misrepresentation pertains to man and leaves him only at the price of supreme intellectual discipline—omnis homo mendax), in concrete experience, I say, a particular and typical misrepresentation, closely bound up with the complex question which we are considering, makes its appearance.

“Pope Denounces Communism.” But we must read his words carefully, and see just what it is he denounces and why he denounces it, however painful and humbling may be the process. And then we must ask ourselves Whether the monster against which he so insistently warns us is not London or Birmingham, or even Nazi Berlin or Fascist Milan, as well as Moscow or Barcelona, U.S.A. as well as U.S.S.R., whether the thing called Atheistic Communism is not to be found among avowed Catholics as well as professed Communists. We must ask ourselves not only whether our industrial-capitalist world is not guilty of having brought about the thing which the Pope calls Atheistic Communism, but further whether it is not guilty precisely of the very evils of Atheistic Communism itself in so far as these fall under the anathemas of the Church as they are expressed in the text of the Encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

It has become a commonplace to repeat what has been so often said of St. Paul, that had he lived in our day he would have been a journalist. And had St. Dominic been living in our own times instead of in the 13th century, what would he have done? I believe that, for reasons similar to those which moved him to found his Order, he would not have changed any essential point of its Constitutions; but, because of the spirit which quickens them, essentially an apostolic spirit, he would have required his Order to make use of the Press as one of the most efficacious means of its apostolate. These are the two points that I shall endeavour to develop briefly, before referring to what the Order of St. Dominic has actually accomplished in the domain of the Press in order to remain faithful to the apostolic spirit of its Founder.

Why did St. Dominic found the Order of Preachers? For a simple answer to this question it suffices to recall in a few words the religious condition of society as it was then, at the beginning of the 13th century. Admittedly that century was one of faith; historical witness of every kind which has come down from those times will not allow us to think otherwise. But at the beginning of that same century the Faith throughout Europe was exposed to great danger, from two sources, firstly, because of the ignorance of religion prevalent among the faithful themselves, and then because of the spread of certain heresies fostered by this very ignorance.

The end of all becoming is being, but not, ultimately, of that which becomes considered by itself: of that which becomes considered as participation in another mode of being which is the mode of being of something which already and really is.

Change means that that which changes is not to be considered by itself.

The end (result) of the body’s constant mutations is the successive participation in the potentiality of matter. But this is not the end (finality) of the body’s mutations. The end (finality) of becoming can be nothing imperfect.

I think this means that the end of all becoming is the participation of all creatures in the risen humanity of Christ.

Being is essentially communicable. You don’t have to explain why being communicates itself, as if it were something being as such were not expected to do. Perfection, what we would call by transliteration the formality of being as such and of actuality, is communicable per se, imperfection communicable per accidens. Imperfection to be communicated implies a pre-established communication in potential being. Communication of imperfection is the abandonment on the part of those who communicate in it of specific and diverse actuality for the sake of that communication in what is potential and common. The communication of perfection is the communication of the diverse as diverse in a unity intrinsically proportioned to its participants. We can understand nothing here without the metaphysical principle of analogy.

The prominence of Pharisaism in the Gospels—the sustained energy of Our Lord’s denunciation of it, His use of it as a sort of dark background against which to illustrate His own religious teaching, should alone be enough to convince us, since we believe in the divine praeparatio evangelii, that the Pharisees are for all time a supremely important type of religious corruption. Whereas we generally look upon them as a type of such imbecile hypocrisy as could hardly be reproduced, and without a qualm of misgiving we continue to spit upon their gaberdines. One thing that helps us to regard their miserable failings as something quite foreign to us is the false notion we have that their general religious position was essentially Protestant, or rather Puritan, in spirit. The truth is that the Pharisees were more akin to Catholics than to Protestants; and they seem to have been far removed from Puritanism. Their multiplying of religious observances upon which we look with great disapproval was at its best an attempt to carry devotion to the Law, that is to the will of God, into everyday life: and not out of any hatred or suspicion of life but simply in order to sanctify it. For far from being Manichees they were not even passable ascetics. The famous rabbinic saying, “A man will have to give account on the judgment day of every good thing which his eyes saw and he did not eat” probably reflects their general mood. Apart from the New Testament, what evidence there is would seem to show that their religious programme was not regarded as burdensome by the people; rather one would gather that it was welcomed by them, only too gladly accepted as a very satisfying way of fulfilling their duties.

“Can there be an heroic humanism?” It is to ask, in effect, whether Christian humanism is possible, a humanism not merely compatible with sanctity, but essentially directed to the achievement of sanctity as to the achievement of its own purpose. But the adjective is significant. Heroism implies a more than human effort, a strain therefore and tension; and the persistent presence of tension implies for the Christian humanist two outstanding dangers: forgetfulness of divine transcendence, forgetfulness of irremediable human sorrow.

The things that are seen have a directness of appeal to the heart that the greater glories miss for being hidden in the obscurities of faith. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.” “It remains, then,” wrote Joannes a Sancto Thoma, “that the captive soul, bound in the bonds of faith to its clouded object, can be illumined only by the flame of love.” And there is no mysticism without tears. “I sought Him Whom my soul loveth, I sought Him and I found Him not.” But the beauty that is not God is ever present, and pulls at the heart to such purpose as to become potential rival of divinity. So the discovery of God often entails a first reaction against the things which before had distracted attention from the search for Him.

The fate of the Encyclical Letter “In the Utmost Anxiety,” addressed to the German hierarchy, is in itself sufficient to show the state of affairs in the Third Reich. It was not allowed to be published either in any secular newspaper or in any purely religious paper. The printers who dared to print the Encyclical for the bishops’ official publication were closed down by the police for the time being and the official papers confiscated. All that was publicly known of the Encyclical was a short notice of a severe protest to the Vatican in respect of it. Following this, the letter was rejected by the Nazi leaders, notably by Adolf Hitler himself who on May 1st made some biting references to critics of the Nazis and allusions to the Pope's Encyclical. In reference to the Churches he said: “So long as they attend to their own affairs the State will not intervene. But if they go against us with sermons and encyclicals and encroach on the business of the State, we shall call them to order and we shall force them back into their proper work of caring for the religious needs of the people.”

The very attempt to suppress the Encyclical proves how right the Holy Father was to condemn therein the eluding and violation of the “Reichskonkordat,” for the later, established in 1933, distinctly maintained the right of free publication of pastoral letters and encyclicals.

“God,” said Voltaire’s Quaker, “God, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to suffer without repining, would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murtherers, cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two feet high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass’s skin extended.” The ass’s skin has largely given place to the broadcast bray and the journalistic bellow; the effect remains the same. And the central problem for the psychologist is surely this: that while war is all but universally agreed to be an unacceptable form of human activity (and the waverers now have China to help to convince them), nevertheless we are faced with the daily possibility of an outburst, and with the certainty that at a word from their politicians the people will flock to the standards and prepare to do themselves what they are now execrating the Japanese for doing. How does this come about? How is it that the politicians, on the one hand, find themselves apparently impotent to prevent war? Is it sheer malevolence and guile; is it due simply to a peculiarly low grade of general intelligence; or is it a case of psychological maladjustment, a distressing complaint, but curable? On the other hand, is the consent of the populace to be attributed simply to the wiles of press and political propaganda, or is is due to psychological factors in the subjects themselves.

Harry the King intervenes between Falstaff and Hamlet. He is Shakespeare’s last successful version of the natural man. And by this I mean that he is the last of those heroes who is himself a success. He has all the natural graces and he has them in abundance. He meets no problem which he does not solve. He is victorious in arms, just though stem in government. He is a Hotspur sobered by responsibility and a Falconbridge of the blood royal. What he successfully answers are, of course, those questions on the nature of kingship which history had posed for Shakespeare in Richard II. The royalty in Harry is no mere lineal prerogative. It is a quality of the soul. It is an earthly echo of what we mean when we talk of the kingship of Christ. It draws its power from its capacity for fellowship with men, and it makes the humblest of men a king in his own kind. It operates with the discriminating generosity of grace and is at the disposal of all who seek it worthily.

After Henry V comes the great bend in the road of Shakespeare’s search. He begins to see into the depth of the human soul and into the extremities of human circumstance; and what he sees is his subject for the next few years. He sees the failure of the human nature he had glorified. He sees tragedy. His hero becomes Brutus and Antony who divide a play between them. There is no doubt that Shakespeare sympathized with Brutus, but he cannot help making him illustrate the thesis which is now hammering at his mind. I mean the futility of action, or rather the incompatibility of action and thought. Brutus is a philosopher-politician; the Arthur Balfour of republican Rome, intellectual, honourable, and detached. His material is thought, not men. But he becomes the General Franco of this particular conspiracy. He is drawn in reluctantly, but once in he assumes a full share of responsibility.

“Pope Denounces Communism” screamed the headlines. And of course there were the usual impertinent attempts to exploit the fact in class-interests. But the text of Divini Redemptoris proved a dangerous weapon for those concerned to preserve the social-economic status quo and to hinder the logical development of the existing industrialcapitalist society into a socialistic one. As said La Libre Belgique:

If atheistic communism is condemned, so too are all those evil “Christians” who live on the miseries of others, the selfish or blind “conservatives” who have failed to foresee that the indignation of the proletariat would impel them to rebellion, the evil rich who have so long been the object of the Saviour’s curses. . . . The vigour of the Pope’s words to them has astounded and disconcerted the more timid. But there are very few who have understood the love that lies hidden in that anger. This Encyclical is a model of righteous indignation at the service of charity, truly befitting a Father who longs for the salvation of his children.