The household of Faith is manifold but single: its unity demands a variety of race and culture and temporal allegiance, reconciled at the centre in Christ our Lord. In time and space, within the categories that men discern, the individuations that spring from historical change, or merely from human temperament, can seem more compelling than the hidden unity which transcends them. And an insistence on the universality that Catholic faith must bring;—the Church is one, holy, Catholic, apostolic, because in Christ there can be no division, because he is holiness, because he willed all men to be redeemed through himself and that redemption to be made accessible through his apostles—such an insistence can never ignore the integrity of men as endowed with shape and colour, with minds and wills uniquely given and to be employed in the context of the life they find. Nor can it ignore the varieties of society— enslaved or free—which the Church exists to redeem.

‘All things to all men’. It is part at least of the Christian aposto- late: the source is one, but the streams go far. And a parish, mirroring the Church herself, may include at one end a monastery, at the other a prison. And in between, the infinite gradations of holiness or the lack of it: solid families of tradition, isolated converts, the rootless and the dispossessed. Behind walls the holy, behind other walls the publicly condemned; and the mission of the Church is to those and to everyone else besides.

In a stable world, with functions regulated and accepted as such, the redemptive work of the Church may seem easier to achieve.

Cyril Cusack: If walls have ears and windows seem like eyes, the ancient oak panelling and leaded panes of this Old Hall of Lincoln’s Inn, where we are gathered by the courtesy of the learned Benchers, have stored up a memory of many a legal inquisition into strange territories of human thought and behaviour. If a tongue could be added to them, they could tell of very diverse causes heard and judgments given upon them. But surely they have seldom if ever witnessed a stranger occasion than this, when that very modem example of human ingenuity and skill, the Cinema, pleads its cause as an art through the medium of a medieval disputation. Such a subject might well seem very far removed from the thinkers of the middle ages and their method of enquiry might well appear ill-chosen to examine its claims. In the sphere of visuals it is surely a far cry from the modern film to the crabbed manuscripts and theological preoccupations of the thirteenth century.

Yet, after all, there is a certain fittingness in the occasion. The Cinema, with all that it stands for, is undoubtedly a great force in modern life, and opinion is very divided as to whether it is a force for good or evil, for the advancement of civilisation and culture or for its impeding and destruction. It is well, therefore, that it should be brought to the bar of judgement and, in that case, it is most fitting that its cause should be heard in this Old Hall of one of the oldest Inns of Court in this ancient city of London. For the Cinema is now on trial as to its claim to be an art, and even the highest form of art; and the canons of art, according to which it must be judged, are laws as firm and as ancient as the true laws of human behaviour.

Until recently the majority of Catholics would have instinctively felt that the Church was on the whole opposed to capitalism. They would not have made a conscious judgment about such a thing because the majority of Catholics was hard at work trying to keep the obvious day-today demands of the Christian law in the face of a mounting antagonism from the non-Christian environment. But they would have instinctively recoiled from associating the direct moral teaching of the Church with an approval of the possession and accruing of wealth without labour and without responsibilities. They knew their Gospels too well for that, and they had often heard the Franciscan message declaring the blessings on the poor in spirit.

Non-Catholics on the other hand would as naturally have tended to associate the Catholic Church with capitalism in view of the apparent association between her ecclesiastical organisation and what had come to be regarded as traditional business methods. They had seldom heard of the social encyclicals that came from Rome and they had never read them. They thought they recognised the Church as most securely established in those countries where the peasants and artisans were most exploited for the benefit of the rich few. Today, with war between the Church and Communism at its height, there can be only a handful of non-Catholics who do not regard that conflict as implying an identification of the Church with capitalism or who, on the other hand, have read such books as Fanfani’s Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism which concludes an intelligent analysis of the question with the judgment that ‘Catholics, so long as they held closely to the social teachings of the Church, could never act in favour of capitalism’.

When it was proposed to repeat the series of daily lectures at Blackfriars, Oxford, during the Unity Octave of 1950, the decree from the Holy Office on the oecumenical movement published during March had not been thought of, nor had The Times correspondence on Catholicism Today yet appeared. But those who read the following papers, which comprise all but one of the lectures finally delivered at Blackfriars in that January ‘Octave’, will realise how The Times correspondence prepared the way for, and gave point and unity to the series. Moreover they can hardly avoid noticing how aptly the lectures conform to the spirit of the decree of the Holy Office; they may, indeed, be taken as an extended commentary of that important document.

It is true that the decree was heralded by an unwise blare of trumpets in the popular press, so that when it did appear in English at the end of February many non-Catholics were disappointed, having been led to expect some ‘concessions’ which the Church could never give. Nevertheless, members of the Church of England have been able to recognise the true meaning and the value of the Vatican document. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself showed a clear understanding of its import when he discussed it as a ‘timely’ and ‘encouraging’ direction to Catholics on what can be done in co-operation with non-Catholics in face of the increasing peril of Christian civilisation. The Church Times gave the document a warm welcome without mistaking its significance : ‘The Roman Catholic ordinaries, to whom the document is addressed, arc instructed to take a positive interest in movements towards reunion, not only to keep close watch upon them, but “prudently to foster and to guide them”.

I wonder how many people have spent five minutes today thinking about the Incarnation.’ The speaker was Father Vincent McNabb. It was during the first world war and the Rosary had just been said in the Gills’ living-room kitchen on Ditchling Common. In default of a chapel, Compline was sung nightly in this long low candle-lit room. At one end two candles burned beside a crucifix on the mantel-shelf, at the other a stone niche flush with the whitewashed wall enshrined a small figure of Our Lady suckling the Divine Child; lights and shadows flickered around their feet from a wick floating in a bowl hollowed out of the same stone. Between these two focal points of light, members of the families and of the workshops, guests and friends, stood on either side of the refectory table so as to form two choirs. Eric acted as cantor or maybe one of the girls; more often Betty whose voice was as plumb in the middle of the note, as English-sweet as her father’s.

Later on, Compline came to be chanted in one of the new workshops and finally in the Guild Chapel. But neither the shadowy resonance of the lofty shop nor the quietude of the white chapel ever recaptured quite the same spontaneity of intimate absorption in the Church s twilight prayer as transfigured nightly that cottage kitchen.

Hopkins’ Crank was at that time a neat square toy of a house on the western fringe of the Common, an untouched Georgian squatter’s cottage, preceded by a porch and diminutive fenced garden. Here amid sweet william, honesty and marigolds there grew two rose-bushes of the kind which, on stems furry with prickles, bears amid many deep-grooved leaves large flat single blooms, white or magenta.

Ortega as a philosopher has met with opposition from some Catholic circles within the Spanish-speaking world because he not only has apparently forsaken his own Catholic tradition but has ignored religion in his own philosophical scheme. If at most he can be said to have left a place for it, the place is so far unoccupied. It is true that very early in his career Ortega gave up the practice of religion and that at no time has religion in any pietistic way interested him as a topic. It is also true that he has always treated it with respect and he includes the religious sense as one of the five elements in his theory of values. (The others are goodness, beauty, truth and justice.)

This neglect, however, is only superficial and accidental. Ortega’s thought is really profoundly religious and one is inclined to classify him as possessing the truly religious temperament of the artist as against the intellectual or mystic. Indeed, one of the difficulties about Ortega’s philosophy all through is that it is a very subtle system of thought, closely articulated, but mediated through a highly aesthetic temperament. Ortega’s philosophical aim is so fundamental that it is unlikely that he himself will ever arrive at the point of sketching the natural theology proper to it. His object is to change radically the whole approach to knowledge and being by starting from the individual experience of living and, instead of projecting concepts upon, as it were, the screen of the intellect, work to truth within that experience.

Like a well-used hackney-coach, the stricture that in all spheres critical standards are declining is beginning to creak: it is a commonplace in everyday criticism whose place is so common that like other similar phrases—‘learning for its own sake’ and ‘the cultures of freedom loving peoples’—it is a statement which now employed seems all but empty of content. Narrowing the stricture here to the treatment meted out to the novel, one is forced to the conclusion by the standard of current criticism exhibited in fiction-reviewing that the decline is one caused principally by ignorance: ignorance about the purpose of a novel and the history of the novel. This charge which is general must regrettably include much of the Catholic press, where the confusion only becomes greater by the haphazard use of the term ‘Catholic novel’. For this reason therefore in the present essay an attempt will be made first to trace the emergence of the novel in English fiction and, secondly, to see how in this larger context what is termed the ‘Catholic novel’ came into being. Finally the actual term ‘Catholic novel’ will be examined.

These were men of mercy whose godly deeds have not failed. Ecclus. 44, 10.

There are still a great many people in England today who regard Catholics as strange and even sinister folk who worship with strange rites in a foreign tongue, render allegiance to the Pope of Rome and have a notable reverence for the Mother of Christ. Yet four hundred years ago there was scarcely a man, woman or child in England who did not accept these rites and this allegiance and this reverence as part of their daily lives, as had their forefathers for many centuries before them. Gathered around this temporary altar, to be present once again at the eternal sacrifice of Calvary within these ruins of a once magnificent abbey, our minds and imaginations inevitably take us back to those days of Catholic England when the great abbey church of St Mary at Hayles resounded by day and night to the prayers of the Cistercian monks who had dedicated their lives here to the service of God and of their fellow-men.

Nearly nine hundred years ago Hayles Manor came into the possession of one William Leuric of whom it is recorded that he freed twelve serfs here. In 1246 Richard, Earl of Cornwall, founded the Abbey of St Mary at Hayles in fulfilment of a vow made on escaping from shipwreck. A few years later his son presented to the abbey church the venerated relic known as ‘the Holy Blood of Hayles’, contained in a crystal phial and believed to contain some of the blood shed by our Redeemer on Calvary, which, until it was ruthlessly destroyed by Cromwell’s agents at the destruction of the monastery, was the venerated object of pilgrimage for countless devout men and women both from this country and from over the seas.

This subject is often discussed as though it were a peculiarly I modern problem, and one to which a complete solution .A. should be found. It is of course neither of these things, but a permanent factor to be reckoned with in the up-bringing of the young. It is surprising, however, that only of recent years was separate provision made for child criminals, though one would have thought that their immaturity of mind and body cried aloud for recognition in any Christian community. In the eighteenth century a child of eight was hanged for arson, and there is a spot in Holbom I never pass without a shudder, for here a poor waif of twelve, convicted of many robberies, was literally dragged to the gallows screaming pitifully for mercy. At the end of the last century little children were still being committed to adult prisons, where they were subjected to unwholesome extremes of petting and harshness. Separate courts for children and a more suitable range of punishments, including probation, began under the inspiration of a group of Quakers in Birmingham in 1850. In 1908 appeared the Children’s Act, which has been most unjustly represented as a gratuitous attack on parental rights, but was in fact an essential instrument for the protection of children from gross ill-treatment and abuses for which the common law gave no remedy. A new era of humane and constructive approaches to the delinquencies of youth had begun.

Forty years later, when a revised and much more generous Children’s Act became law, some 40,707 boys and 3,770 girls under seventeen were convicted of indictable offences, and 27,435 youngsters of non-indictable offences. Very disappointingly, this represented a rise amounting to 26% over the previous year (1947) in those between eight and fourteen years and of 23% in those between fourteen and seventeen. When all the obvious war-time excuses have been made the figures for boys are too high to be contemplated with complacency.

Note: The following article by the Warden of the Residential College for Adult Education at Urchfont Manor, Devizes, was occasioned by the writer being invited to open the discussion after the lecture on science as a substitute for religion by Dr Sherwood Taylor, published in the last issue of Blackfriars. Writing quite evidently from a non-Catholic standpoint the author makes his suggestions with the authority of experience, for he deals constantly with the average man-in-the- street whose suspicions of religion and whose faith in science have turned the present era into a post-Christian age. There are forty million, or 80% of the population of England and Wales, who accept this point of view without question, so that the suggestions on how to meet them in such a way that they may be willing to listen to the Christian point of view are among the most urgent of the day. Catholics still seem a little dazed at the immense avalanche of desertion from Christianity and they often lack experience of the other point of view since they hold on to their own faith with such praiseworthy tenacity. It is therefore with gratitude to the author and with a plea to the Christian reader to consider his words deeply that we present the article as a continuation of the discussion begun by Dr Sherwood Taylor in the last issue of Blackfriars.—-Editor.

A Good deal of time has been spent in the last few years proving that the central doctrines of Christianity are not in conflict with the main theories of modem science. There has, of course, been much genuine conflict between Christianity and the social or philosophic implications, usually materialist, which some scientists have read into their work.

The question of the reintegration of Christendom has been brought before the public of this country recently by an article and a series of letters in The Times, and before the whole world by the Holy Father’s address on Christmas Eve. I hope that some of the following remarks may help to explain to non-Catholics why it is that we Catholics do not seem to be able to join in whole-heartedly with some of the attempts that are made from time to time to effect that reintegration by a process of corporate reunion of the separated Christian bodies; although we are at least as anxious as any other body to see reunion achieved. And we believe that we hold from God the key to reunion.

There is a homesickness for visible unity in the Christian world today, thank God. The crisis of our civilization, the growth of secularism, the menace of conscious deliberate organized antiChristian forces have no doubt in part occasioned this heightened sense that Christians must unite in face of common perils. And again, the serious disadvantages (to use no stronger language) that attend upon Christian missionary effort, both at home and abroad, through the mutual contradictions and competition of the various Christian communions, are perhaps more vividly realised at present than at most times in the past three hundred years. But surely the driving force of what I may call the reunion movement is something deeper, more native to Christianity as such, than even these grave practical considerations. Surely the dynamism of the movement, or movements, comes from a growing conviction that disunity can only be justified by a virtual denial of something that is of the very essence of Christianity, that it would mean contradicting the intention of God Incarnate. Did he not himself remind us that a kingdom or a house divided against itself cannot stand?

Mind you, I don't mean to say that men and women in the world, around us are wallowing in mortal sin: they haven't got the constitution for it.—Mr Frank Sheed, .addressing the Boseo Conference. Edinburgh, 1947.

Mr Sheed (Man the Forgotten) and Mr Alexis Carrel (Man the Unknown) both chose to write a book about Man. The Catholic wrote didactically, emphasising the known truths about man and his divine origin and destiny. The scientist came very near in many ways to the Catholic position. Both entered a protest against the materialistic trends that would move man from his central and unique place in the universe and regard him simply as another species and subordinate his individuality to the laws that govern masses. These two authors, however, differed, as far as my present subject is concerned, in that the Catholic tended to look backwards while the scientist took cognisance of something that the other decided to ignore, the possibility that man is still undergoing evolutionary change.

Fundamentally, it goes without saying, man does not change. If the concept man differs from the man whom the psalmist sang of and Christ provided for and St Thomas considered in his cosmic and eternal setting then not only philosophy but also theology are challenged. Terms, above all the major term in all our syllogisms about man, have changed their meaning and we are wandering in the jungles of incertitude again.

Though the nature, characteristics and consequences of the economic system we call ‘capitalism’ are so well known as to be taken for granted, yet when we try to frame a definition of the system it is not at all easy. There exists a multitude of definitions of capitalism: the fact that many of these are incomplete or else falsified by subjective interpretations adds to the general confusion.

To begin with, we can say that capitalism is a system; that is to say, it is the realisation in the factual order of an economic doctrine. There is a considerable amount of evidence, both in theory and practice, in support of the position which maintains that the economic doctrine enshrined in capitalism has two essential characteristics. It is based upon private ownership of the means of production and of the goods produced: its raison d’etre, its end or objective, is profit.

This second element—the accumulation of money for its own sake as the sole objective—immediately puts capitalism in conflict with Christian moral teaching. Attempts have been made to explain away this opposition by attributing it to moral failings in individuals by saying it is the capitalist spirit and not capitalism itself which is bad. There will always be individuals who sin against God and against their neighbour by the sin of avarice: these individuals flourish in any economic regime: capitalism is good in itself and must not be blamed for their existence. Such an attitude is completely shattered by Horvath in his famous book on property.