“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.

At the time of writing (December 16th) ministers of State and dignitaries of the Established Church show much solicitude that the mysterious events which culminated in the abdication of Edward VIII should be forgotten (and some would piously add, forgiven) as soon as possible. Since so many of the attendant circumstances still remain unexplained, the solicitude may appear to some to be sinister. But it is in no spirit of obstreperousness that we recall the remarkably non-conformist attitude adopted by our Catholic press during the “crisis.” It seems probable, though the fact would be hard to verify, that among no one section of the community was there such sympathy for His former Majesty than among Catholics of all classes; and nowhere more widespread suspicion, founded or unfounded, that the affair was in some way a “frame-up.”

On Thursday, December 3rd, with a uniformity in diversity that Dr. Goebbels might well envy, the London press—on the pretext of a constitutional crisis whose very existence was shortly to be denied—released the long-suppressed story of “the King’s desire.” Before the public had recovered its breath, The Tablet was out the following morning with a memorable leader on “The King's Matter” which was as remarkable for its penetration and its independence as for its promptness. The Editor of GK’s Weekly followed shortly on a similar line.

The noble quality of the sentiments of this book will account for its having received on the whole a far more indulgent treatment by the reviewers—even by those writing on behalf of the Churches—than it properly deserves. There might be a strong temptation to follow this general lead, if it were any less easy than it is, while attacking the book, to maintain entire respect for the author. The doctrine is completely untrue to the principles of the Anglo-Catholic Creed which the author professes. It is in fact but a travesty of Christian doctrine. But this clearly is a mischance that has come about through an undisciplined cavalry charge by the Left wing of the author’s mind. A reviewer can take his stand comfortably between the author and his book.

Christ as portrayed in these pages shows Himself to be first and foremost a socio-political revolutionary. An order of social well-being, of justice and plenty achieved for all men, does not appear to Him as an effect that should naturally follow upon and be as the fulfilment and expression of the spiritual life He brings to men, but rather as an essential constitutive means for the formation of a state of “salvation.” That is to say, it is only by a successfully achieved reordering of social conditions that the salvation He offers can become a “saving” thing at all. If He is to be called our Saviour (in any sense that He Himself would approve) it can only be through a salvation which in fact delivers our bodies in this world from the evils of injustice and poverty and the rest.

It is often dangerous to apply the conduct of the past as a norm to the present. Only too often a facile parallel between days gone by and the present has led to an absurdly literal equation between the two, as we may observe sometimes in the use made of precedent. At the same time fresh light may occasionally be thrown on a situation by indulging in such fancies without intending too rigid an application. It is a fanciful comparison of this sort which we set down here as a feeler, searching out a possible method of regaining the proletariat for Christ, and so of counteracting the powerful appeal which Communism makes to our age.

The facts of St. Dominic's life and vocation are generally known, and here we wish only to draw attention to certain aspects of it. When St. Dominic came to Languedoc, on his way to negotiate a marriage with a foreign princess on behalf of his Sovereign, he found the Church hard pressed by an enemy powerful because popular. One of the causes of the popularity of Albigensianism was the apparently severe interpretation of Christian life by the leaders of the movement, and the people, as always, were profoundly impressed at the sight of rigid austerity linked with a burning zeal. The Church had, of course, attempted to save her people from the ravages of the heresy, and had sent out her emissaries in the sombre yet rich state appropriate to their condition as bishops, abbots and priests. But if such attire and accoutrement was the due of these defenders of the faith, it turned out to be a hindrance to their fight for truth since it contrasted ill, in the minds of the populace, with the ostentatiously ascetic lives of the Albigensian leaders.

In 1934, when it was known that André Gide had turned to Communism, the news excited much attention. Gide had stood for an extreme individualism. Had he not, in a popular phrase, exalted the morals of the aesthetic? Had he not glorified that type of individual merely in order to portray a personality pure and real, beyond all moral ties? Had he not always been in search of truth, in praise of truth, despising all dogma, all belief in the possibility of a traditional authority capable of comprising the truth? And now André Gide, the descendant of an old French family, the symbol of an over-refined intellectualism, had become the follower of revolutionary dogmatic Moscow. Did this fact alone not signify that the bourgeoisie was at the end of its power and influence?

André Gide was a model to all those intellectuals, coming out of the bourgeoisie, to whom the existing order had become so unbearable that they took in earnest the promises of Communism, sometimes even knowing, as Gide knew, that the world of Communism was in reality a contradiction of their own being.

“The horror of the war of to-morrow is that no fever of collective exaltation, no lyricism of poet or orator, will be able to ennoble it or mark it with the authentic sign of the spirit. The apparent ideological character with which no doubt it will be invested will not long obscure its true nature: the conflict of the selfishness of classes, adding a new complication to the selfishness of nationalisms, will make it wholly inhuman. Not only in its furies, but in its very causes, the war will be wholly barbarous: the bankruptcy of the spirit giving over to the chances of force the care of making a world, the bloody clash of a too numerous population in a too narrow peninsular, the drama of fear and hunger. Such perhaps will be our destiny: to die in a catastrophe, in a medley of causes so confused and of results so dubious for our country itself that we shall really not know for what good we have given our lives” (pp. n, 12). This is perhaps the chief cause of our present distress and despair in face of the future: the knowledge that it is so easy to give our allegiance to a cause which to-morrow may reveal as either wholly or in part the wrong cause: “We are afraid of learning that ultimate bitterness of the dying soldier who does not understand the point of his death; more, we fear lest one day orators stand over our tombs to proclaim us, not what we would have wished but what events have decided for us, or worse still, what the interests of a party will demand should be said” (p. 12).

Recent years have seen the birth and astonishing growth of a movement whose title, marking the place of its first organization, is the somewhat valuable one of the “Oxford Groups.” Although the movement has almost ceased to be a factor in undergraduate life, the name remains: an annual meeting at Oxford—a distinction enjoyed by many other bodies—fosters the connection.

Catholics are not likely to be encouraged to take part in a religious movement outside the visible Church, “undenominational,” and exhibiting many of the features of revivalism; that much may be said at the start. Often in the past treated by Catholics as a joke, the Groups at least merit attention; moreover, at certain points, they touch upon Catholic life. Part of their main programme of “winning the world for Christ” is, avowedly, the “awakening of the historic churches,” with consequent overtures to Catholics: individuals, perhaps unwittingly, have found their way into its ranks. All the more reason then for Catholics to examine the nature of the movement, and form an estimate of its true worth: further, we ought all, priests and laity alike, to be on the look-out for any lesson that may prove of value when translated into Catholic Action.

Marxism is not a philosophy. It is a technique of revolution. Hence the critique of those whose minds are fixed in academic ways of thought nearly always misses the point. We are not dealing with a system of thinking which claims its confirmation in the identities of being, but with one which claims its confirmation in action and in practice. Moreover it does not confirm itself by referring back to traditional ways of action or established practice; it claims its verification in the unity of thought with revolutionary practice. And it is not merely catastrophic in its method; far less is it merely Utopian. That type of criticism, therefore, which paints Marxism as a Utopian system in order to ridicule it as such may have some bearing on the various forms of Utopian socialism which Marx and his followers always fiercely attacked, but practically none on Marxism.

The basic concept of dialectic materialism is matter in motion, and essentially so. “Motion,” says Engels (Anti-Dühring) “is the mode of existence of matter.” To apply this principle to society, the social situation must be understood in its process if we are to enter at all into the Marxian outlook. For Marxism is a system of social dynamics and it is often rejected at the cost of losing also any grasp of history as a real and living development rather than as a marginal note to an a priori thesis independent of our carnal lives.

On reading the quiet, always scholarly and often humorous pages of a veteran’s book on a difficult subject, it is hard to know whether it is the book or the writer that holds us most. The bibliography given in Pére Lagrange’s study of Orphism suggests the obvious remark that the lyre of the Thracian god—if he be a god and if he be a Thracian—still renders spell-bound but not dumb-founded a throng of living beings.

Needless to say this latest writer on the Thracian god has not given his time and scholarship to one of those pagan myths that were hardly more than premonitory symptoms of the present world-wide outbreak of fiction. Pére Lagrange has been by nature and choice so authentic a defender of the Ark that even in his lightest words he has been at least brushing off annoying and persistent flies.

In this remote matter of Orpheus and Orphism the assailants of the Ark are not a company of irregulars. Loisy, Reinach, Boulanger and others are worthy of Pére Lagrange’s best defence, and le beau sabreur, even in his old age, does not disappoint us. If we were allowed to summarize Pére Lagrange’s summary of his own view we would say: In Thrace, in Greece, in Crete, the (orphic) religion of Zagreus was mingled with the Egyptian cult of Osiris. About the seventh century before Christ this fusion of Zagreus and Osiris was further mixed with the cult of Dionysos which had come from Phrygia and Lydia to Greece through Thrace. If Dionysos (or Bacchus) was an element of joy and even intoxication, the Zagreus-Osiris blend was an element of fear and even of pessimism. Indeed the original Orphism, as distinct from its Dionysian element, was not the wine but the vinegar of life.

When I speak of a hero I do not imply the possession of those qualities which we normally think of as heroic. I do not mean courage in battle, constancy in love, generosity in triumph, resignation in defeat; I do not mean the glamour of physique and the leadership of arms, although we shall find these qualities in many of Shakespeare’s people. I mean by a Shakespearean hero, not the character whom his judgment approved, but the character with whom his imagination was identified.

A very penetrating critic, Mr. Middleton Murry, to whose recent book on Shakespeare I am greatly indebted, has written as though he did not exercise the prerogative of moral judgment. He would have us believe that Shakespeare’s genius was a mirror wherein the contradictions and the multiplicity of life expressed themselves, and that it was not in his nature to interpret this movement in the light of moral principles. In a word, he was a man of imagination rather than a man of character. I do not question a limited truth in this. Shakespeare was a man of his own time. The romantic tradition of criticism, to which we owe the dangerous elucidations of Coleridge, so stressed the universal character of his genius that it forgot that he had also a “local habitation and a name.” It ignored his particularity of time and place. I can see no reason to doubt that he shared the baffled and half-sceptical philosophy of his time; nor that in the person of Hamlet he gave it a definitive voice. His mind did not move against any fixed background of theological beliefs, as Dante’s did, but he clearly inherited, along with many others of his time, a hierarchy of moral values which were the legacy of a Christian and a classical culture. He will indict Goneril and Regan for filial ingratitude, Anthony for excess of passion, Macbeth for treachery and murder. Even when his characters have committed crime or folly they are haunted by a high conception of honour.

The sublime fact of being members of the essentially living Church, bestowed upon us in Holy Baptism, implies a task with regard to our people. The Living World-Church wills, through us her living members, to build our German people into a living Church. There is very little sense to start by drawing up magnificent plans for the re-conquering of the de-christianized populations for the Church, although it goes without saying that this re-conquest remains an important task to be accomplished by us. But in order to achieve it successfully, another task is even more important, viz., the total Christianization of those who are still living in the Living Church. Re-christianization of the estranged population is only possible by means of total Christianization of the Christian community itself. In conferring together as to the method of building up our contemporary German people into a Living Church, ways and means will have to be discussed, and in the first place, how to make each one of us into a Living Member of the Church.

By far the most important element in this personal transformation into a Living Church will be the Life-preservation and the Life-intensification by means of the Holy Eucharist.

If there is one section of the community which seems to remain impervious to Catholic influence, it is that body of educated Englishmen whose religion is little more than an ethical code. There have been, of late years, numbers of conversions from among the Anglo-Catholics, Congregationalists, and others of more or less definite belief; very few from among those supporters of institutional religion whose creed—if it can so be called—is limited to a certain standard of external conduct. Leaders of men, imbued with the best public school traditions, the section is a large and important one; we will typify it by the representatives we should find in a regimental Mess, or in the Ward Room of one of His Majesty’s ships.

Such men have little opportunity of meeting with Catholic life: a mixed marriage here and there: a few Catholic friends in their own profession: a visit to a Catholic country, where they will continue to live very much their own life—a race apart; these are the sum total of their contacts. These separated brethren are worthy of more consideration and attention than they are accustomed to receive. Moreover, there is a defensive standpoint, and those Catholics who are drawn into the same state of life, and often, by force of circumstances, deprived of many of the helps of their religion, have to be on their guard lest they too become “code-religionists.”

By his study of the contemporary relations between Church and State on the continent of Europe Dr. Adolf Keller has deserved well not only of his co-religionists but of all those who are vitally interested in the present phase of the perennial struggle between Christianity and the powers of this world. Naturally, his view of the solution of these problems does not coincide with the Catholic view, but it certainly shows a realization of the need for greater unity, on which Catholics insist, and his analysis of the actual situation and presentation of the facts are of the greatest value to those of our Faith who are endeavouring to understand the situation and contribute towards its improvement. It is therefore the object of the present article to make a rapid survey of the problem in the light mainly of Dr. Keller’s evidence and to give some indication of the probable outcome of contemporary events in this sphere.

The constitution of the Church is divine and remains fixed and permanent, that of the State is human and based on contingent needs which vary from age to age. It follows that the relation between Church and State will not change through any development of the former but only through the different attitude which the State takes up with regard to the Church’s claims. In the light of her long experience and aided by the guidance of the Holy Ghost, the Church will adopt different methods according to the changing needs of time and place in order to fulfil her age-old task of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth and to bring supernatural life to the members of States which fail to recognize a law higher than the natural and often even offend against the latter.

Some little time ago the present writer was ordered by his Prior to speak at an Inter-denominational Anti-War demonstration on Hampstead Heath. The demonstration was no doubt due to a widespread opinion that, all physical and political expedients for ensuring peace having failed, the only hope for peace would be through moral means. This opinion bore on its face the outline of sanity and almost of inevitability. Indeed so sane and inevitable did it seem, and does it still seem, that even men who profess to believe that religion is the opium of the people are often found blaming the ministers of religion for not bringing in, as by a miracle, the reign of peace.

The difficulty I felt in being obedient to the command of obedience was not a distaste for any command. Still less was it a disagreement with the belief that no physical nor political expedients but only moral expedients will end war. But I felt a great disinclination to speak on an interdenominational peace platform; and that, firstly, because of an inevitable conclusion and, secondly, because of an undeniable observation.

The inevitable conclusion was that if war could be ended only by moral means the chief agents in ending it could only be the moral expert or professionals, namely the ministers of religion.

The undeniable observation was that nowhere was there such a state of war and such a need of peace as in the sphere of religion.

It is Narcissus who sees in the unrippled water the transfiguration flash back of its liquid clearness. He is like a god, so perfectly is his vision proportioned to his seeing, so uniquely has the element reserved for him a significance which is for him alone. Completely and wholly it is for him, but for the pool he gazes on is this interchange of light and of looks anything less than the end possessed, the entelechy and the consummation of its being? For this it was made, that it should receive this imprint of light from above and so render it. A clarity-in-general become indelibly this clarity, uniquely its and his. The word which utters it is a new thing in the scale of creation.

It seems to me that poetry ceased to form itself upon the Liturgy in order to form itself upon the poet's own likeness seen in the mirror of the world. (Or is the’ statement “simplicist,” a priori, slick?) Tuncks, then, in his naked individuality, creeps out from Choir to choose between the apple-orchards and the wilderness. It has commonly been one or the other, according, perhaps, as the sense of sight in his non-spatial anatomy lies nearer the heart or the intelligence, or to the liver, source of black bile and sombre landscapes. So with his note-book Gerard Manley Tuncks searching the inscapes of clouds and flowers, the ash-tree and “weeds in wheels” for the reflection of his own countenance which is in the eyes of Jesus Christ, but vicariously in “the bluebell I have been looking at. I can tell the beauty of our Lord by it.”

“I See so increasingly plainly the triple fault and undermining character of my influence ... If only I had looked out against the selfishness of leaning on one whom I ought to have propped still for many a day! I have dropped my own child, my first-born, whom God gave me to carry and to guard . . .”

These words occur in the poignant appeal which Baron von Hiigel addressed to his newly-found friend, Father George Tyrrell, S.J., in 1897. The Baron, lonely in his unique intellectual and spiritual greatness, hungry for companionship and understanding, had made his twenty-year-old daughter his confidant and the close sharer of his mental strife. In so doing he had wrecked her health and her faith, and he turned to Father Tyrrell to help her in her need. Tyrrell responded nobly and wisely, and wrote to von Hiigel:

Whatever opinion Catholics may hold about the utility of the World Conference on Faith and Order recently held at Edinburgh we must at least recognize the witness it bears to a deep and growing determination on the part of Christians of widely differing allegiances to bring to an end the disastrous divisions of Christendom. This determination has given rise to a new way of approach to the problem of re-union, a new technique in dealing with the differences which divide Christians. Controversy of the old type between antagonists, who laboured without any attempt at mutual understanding or sympathy to prove themselves entirely right and their opponents entirely wrong, is of comparatively little use in attaining truth. Its place has been taken by the way of affirmation which first explores and emphasizes every possible point of agreement and by so doing clearly marks off the points at which divergence begins and how far it extends. Experience shows that such divergence is often due more to the partial or faulty presentation of truth than to perversity of mind or will in accepting it. The careful probing of historical causes can do much to prepare the way for reconciliation, by a frank acknowledgment of shortcomings where they exist and a sympathetic understanding of the false emphasis and consequent error to which such shortcomings have often given rise. This is the human and preparatory element in the work of the Reunion of Christendom; the necessary spade-work which must be done before the soil is ready for the Holy Spirit to produce the fruits of reconciliation—a perfect union of heart and mind in Christ Jesus.

‘It is to be held as an article of faith,” wrote Pope Pius IX, “that outside the apostolic Roman Church no man can be saved, for it is the sole ark of salvation.”

Nevertheless, we find in the same pronouncement, we are to hold with equal certainty “that those who are afflicted by ignorance of the true religion, provided that ignorance is invincible, are not accounted in any way guilty by God on that account.”

The Church’s language is that of paradox. Her decrees, her definitions, sketch out supernatural cosmic realities in huge, generous, sweeping outlines. There is little refinement, distinction, qualification. The faith-lit mind is trusted to press on behind these symbols to the grand totalities symbolized. Thus the Church guards us against seizing the relative sign for the absolute thing, the letter for the Divine Word, representing for us infinitesimal fragments of the integral reality to be believed and loved.

Many extravagant claims have been made in the Press for this book, none however as sweeping as that made by a writer in the Daily Telegraph of March 5, in which he gravely assures us that “the result of his [Mr. Baskerville’s] study of these sources [the contemporary documents in the Public Record Office] is a book which one must accept as the most authoritative account yet published of this curious chapter in English history” [namely the Suppression of the monasteries]. He also tells us that the “sob-stuff” writers, against whom, he requires us to believe, Mr. Baskerville tilts with complete success, are those who “have either not consulted contemporary documents or have ignored them.”

This is indeed devastating, for the most prominent twentieth-century “sob-stuff” writer (a “sob-stuff” writer being one who refuses to accept the religious houses as “corrupt, immoral, and obviously having outlived their usefulness”) was the late Dr. James Gairdner, a nonCatholic, who during his fifty-four years of work in the Record Office edited the twenty-one volumes divided into thirty-one parts (each part a great tome) which form the Calendar of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, a work so much appreciated by Mr. Baskerville that he has liberally helped himself from it to the extent of no less than one hundred and eighty-eight quotations. At the period of Mr. Gairdner’s work another assiduous toiler in the Record Office was the late Father C. F. Raymund Palmer, O.P., busy between 1870 and 1890 compiling his many works on the history of the English Dominicans. His is a very honourable name amongst research students.