Within the limits of a short paper it is possible to deal with no more than a single aspect of juvenile delinquency, if one makes an effort beyond mere generalities. I propose to say something about the punishment of young offenders after their conviction in the criminal courts. To justify and to explain what I say on this matter I shall assume therefore the truth of two statements: the first, that the amount of crime committed by young people to be very serious, and the second that the character of their offences is often very grave.

I am by no means one of those who takes the view that the young offender is almost always the victim of circumstance, for whom punishment in die old-fashioned sense of the word is either useless, unjust, or inappropriate. Nevertheless, the most modest experience of the juvenile courts teaches one immediate lesson. It is that delinquents vary so widely in intelligence, as also in material circumstances, that in any decision as to the selection of punishment a court must consider carefully every individual offender. This is a matter not of sentiment or of mercy but of the plainest expediency. If this rule is disregarded, real efficiency of a bench is impossible. It is quite impossible for a court either to do real justice or to get the best results if it measures out punishments by rule-of-thumb methods. Two defendants may have committed precisely similar wrongful acts, but it may well be wholly unjust and absurd to award them the same penalty. I labour this point advisedly because it is the basic principle upon which rests the wise administration of criminal law. Again I emphasise that to accept this principle does not mean in the least that one rejects all severe and painful punishment as necessarily wrong. It means only that an instructed judge regards all punishment as a form of treatment.

The Catholic attitude to the colour question is necessarily I bound up with the doctrine of human origins. It is clear, from the recent Encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, that we cannot maintain that the names Adam and Eve in Genesis should be taken in a generic sense, and so must hold that all existing men are descended from only two first parents. It follows that such differences of race or colour as exist among men can only be regarded as partially fixed characteristics due to periods of different climatic, cultural and hereditary factors. These periods may have been very long, and the fixing of characteristics so deep rooted that it cannot quickly be changed. But all have developed from a common beginning and, if the differentiating factors were now neutralised, particularly if inter-marriage took place, colour distinctions and all other racial distinctions could disappear in a common future. Moreover it must always be remembered that these distinctions are, from the Catholic point of view, only in the less essential part of men. The ‘living soul’ that God breathed into Adam is similarly breathed into each individual by him, and is that which makes him to be a human person. Human persons who, in addition to this, have the bond of grace in the Mystical Body of Christ, have a greater unity, however far apart they may be in their physiological composition, than even blood-relations who have it not.

Obviously enough a short article on the history of Catholic thought in England in the last hundred years can only suggest a few thoughts of a general nature, for a mere date list without detailed historical interpretation would be useless, and several volumes would be needed for the latter task. A hundred years ago Catholic thought in England was broadening under the influence of Wiseman and Newman. It is, however, a mistake to think that they created it, for behind them lies the solid historical and spiritual interests of the priests of the penal days: strong controversialists, such as Milner, historians of the type of Lingard, and writers like Butler and Challoner, were all massively English in their virtues and prejudices. Their thought was unspeculative, concrete, and strongly, though not deeply, based on the Latin Fathers.

With Wiseman and Newman, new influences were brought to bear which served to constitute the pattern of Catholic thought for the next fifty years. Wiseman with his generous, though somewhat undisciplined, imagination brought Catholic England into contact with the thought of the Munich circle and of the French Liberal school. For Wiseman these movements involved a vision of the restoration of the faith, but a glance at Ward’s Life makes it clear that his hopes rested on an inadequate intellectual synthesis, in that it was too strongly influenced by theological Traditionalism and implied a naive view of Liberalism. It was, in short, a Catholic variety of the early nineteenth century theologies of feeling. This statement serves to stress the interesting, though often forgotten, fact that the thinkers of the Catholic Restoration knew little of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages, and what they did see they tended to misunderstand as they saw it reflected in the blurred mirror of Romanticism.

A Writer was recently rebuked in the Catholic Press for asking the question: What would have happened if every pulpit in the land had thundered against the factory conditions of the early industrial revolution; supposing the Church had said, ‘We care not one jot or title for your iron laws of Economics, we care nothing about the alleged financial ruin of the country; these are not our concern’? And the same writer withal is again reproved for his belief that de facto economic forces are more powerful than moral ones, that we are driven daily to greater and greater completeness of monopoly control, that private interest would have it so, that government supports the process, and that war speeds up its tempo. It is of course understandable that to authors and journalists, recendy busied in boosting a highly moral war, and looking for another, any doctrine of economic supremacy should be repugnant. For it must be granted that the economic argument, however true, gives a shaky moral basis for planning—whether of wars or the peace. Habitaculum quamquam miserum quomodo non palatium aequiparantur coelestium ipsimet enim aedifcaverunt....

It is not quibble but objective fact that communism and capitalism cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive. Even Lenin admitted as much when he introduced the N.E.P. Capitalism postulates distribution (however unequal) and co-operation (however unwilling). And the world has yet to witness a communism that has dispensed with capital. There have been communists and communists, Essenes, monks and nuns as well as Bolsheviks. So much for its practice. As for the theory of it, it has had other prophets than Marx.

The first step towards the investigation of the extent to which science has in fact taken and may continue to take the place of religion is to decide the sense in which we are to understand the word science. First, we are to discuss not scientia but ‘natural science’, and this is not a sharply definable conception. Natural science is the knowledge and theories that are obtained by the scientific method. The scientific method starts from observations, verifiable by repetition or, where repetition is not possible, by the making of similar observations. These observations lead by the method of induction to statements about classes of observations, which statements we dignify with the name of laws. These laws may be used as material for the deduction of other laws which are only accepted if verified by their prediction of what experiment confirms.

The observations of science are never wholly accurate (except when they are enumerations), but their degree of error is usually known and so we can arrive at comparatively reliable statements about what has been observed. The inductions made from these observations are of a degree of reliability dependent on the number of observations used and the accuracy with which these are expressed by the generalisation. Some scientific laws, then, make statements which are very unlikely to be appreciably modified, while others are considerably less certain.

The scientific laws are not a disconnected set of rules; they are unified by the theories or suppositions concerning the nature of what science studies. Thus the atomic theory links together hundreds or thousands of laws in physics and chemistry, explains them, and suggests new lines of investigation. These theories are the more likely in proportion as they link together a wider range of laws (and so of observations) and as they are fruitful in leading to new knowledge. Some theories, such as the atomic theory, are practically accepted as fact; others, such as Wegener’s theory of floating continents, as fruitful conjectures.

It is obviously impossible in a brief article to discuss the relation between the corpus of Catholic belief, tradition, and their pastoral applications on the one hand, and the enormous mass of half-digested material which is modern psychology, on the other. I have chosen to throw out a few hints as to the kind of problems which agitate the mind of anyone who is concerned with the subject. I am dealing with two terms of a discussion which to many Catholics appear to be irreconcilable.

I hope that those who keep their Blackfriars back-numbers, or can get hold of them, will re-read a long and searching article, by Father Victor White in the number for August 1945 entitled ‘Psychotherapy and Ethics’, for these notes are prompted largely by that essay, and the long interval of time is a measure of its vivid effect upon my thought. I will doubtless appear to have overstressed the difference between us, which is probably far more one of theory than of practice. I may thereby also give some wrong impressions by overstating the case for psychology; this is perhaps inevitable in any debate.

I do however regard the reconciliation and synthesis of religion and psychology as of far greater importance than that between ‘religion and science’ which agitated a previous generation.

Not long ago General Smuts made a very significant statement about U.N.O. He pointed out that the ‘world vote’ instituted by the United Nations may come to be a coloured majority vote. Already the Nations which administer coloured dependencies are beginning to feel the draught. Britain and Belgium and France are indignant about the ‘back-seat drivers’ of colonial administration. South Africa has felt half a gale already. It is only a matter of time until someone notices, and makes a case of, the treatment of American Negroes, which is legally so sound, but actually leaves so much to be desired. If U.N.O. is going to turn on those that founded it, it is principally in matters of colour. If Western Liberalism as a whole is to lose the confidence of its multi-coloured following, it will be on this question. Nor would a triumph over Russia in war leave things any better—possibly rather worse. For each time the coloured peoples are asked to co-operate in a war they expect additional recognition after it, and anxious war-time promises are then evaded until the coloured peoples lose patience.

This is a very serious matter for Christianity, since the West claims, in a general manner, to represent Christianity. Unless there is a very marked change in the colour situation of the whole world the same process as that which has discredited Christianity with the working class of Western nations will take place in connection with colour bars. Just as the ‘workers’ were taught to identify the Church with capitalism, the enemy; so the coloured peoples will be urged to identify it with colour superiority prejudice. And both have just sufficient grounds in facts of the conduct of Christians, Catholics included, to make the accusation really dangerous.

Shortly after the year 400 the poet Prudentius wrote that the Roman Empire had never been more flourishing nor so happy. All the evidence that we possess tends to show that it seemed eternal and impregnable to its citizens. It was impossible for them to conceive of their life without it. The Western provinces formed a single, carefully administered state, covering modern England, France, the Netherlands, Western Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, North Africa, and part of the Balkans. All were joined by a common culture, a common way of life, the common use of Latin. There were close economic links with the Eastern provinces of the Empire grouped round the other end of the Mediterranean. Here, Greek was the common language instead of Latin and great cities like Antioch and Alexandria had come to play roles paralleled today by New York and Chicago.

In the year 400, the young Emperor in the East was brother to the Emperor of the West and was thought of as his partner in a single sovereignty. The partnership seemed indissoluble. In the words of the greatest of fourth-century poets, ‘All Roman subjects were citizens of a single city, children round a single hearth’. The Roman way of life was prized as the common heritage of all free men. During the last forty years there had been a great increase in legislation in the West. For the most part, it had been enlightened and progressive and it regulated to the smallest detail the activities of every citizen.

The great growth in adult education through the tutorial and other types of classes has been one of the most interesting educational developments of recent years. This in its turn has led to an increase in the numbers of adult educational centres and colleges; these vary from the purely technical non-residential schools to long-term residential colleges such as the Catholic Workers’ College and Ruskin College at Oxford. There are also shorter courses, normally of a week or week-end, running throughout the year at places like Ashridge, Burton Manor and Grantley Hall. Many of the ideas which inspired the founding of this latter type of college are attributable to the Danish Folk High Schools, and in England, to the work of Sir Richard Livingstone, in particular to his valuable little book, The Future in Education. The other force behind this growth in adult education centres has been and still is the work and ideals of bodies such as the Workers Educational Association and the University Extra-Mural Departments. Those who attend tutorial classes, one-year, or terminal classes, have in many cases wanted to meet together away from their normal, and often grim, environment; this desire has been met by holding summer schools in the universities or other large residential centres.

There were giants in those days’. It was in reference to the I past generation of Catholic writers that the remark was made, to the generation of Chesterton, Gill, Belloc and Baring, all those whose brilliance and wit led to talk of a Catholic revival in fashionable circles. How many of them were really giants might be questioned; but it is beyond question that a lesser breed followed in their wake, whose clever caperings and ‘told-you-so’ attitude did little credit to anyone, least of all to the ‘giants’ and the cause they served. Nor has the cause been better served by that superficial reading of the ‘giants’ which induced ill-founded reveries of an ‘age of faith’ and readily identified Christianity with dead cultures.

And the most poisonous effect of this fashionable nostalgia has been to leave a whole generation of young people thinking of themselves as inhabiting a world of winter which they can only hope will somehow turn again into a medieval summer. It will not. For despite the gloomy predictions and pessimistic determinism of the swelling band of prophet-historians, this wintry world is the one we have to live in, and, under God, it is we who must alter it. Furthermore, if only we were not so blind, if only we would take our eyes away from the past and look at the world in which we are living, we should see the summer, here already, shining in countless heroic lives. There are giants in these days. It is true, they are not given to poetry and belles-lettres, these giants of our day; they are a silent race, as becomes those who remember Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Where are they to be found? Many of them in monasteries, returning to God his choicest gifts, even the gift of speech; some live in Eastern Europe; others, perhaps, sell Catholic papers outside Lyons Corner House on dreary Saturday nights.

Forty years ago an unassuming old lady dressed in grey travelled up and down England with the novel purpose of interesting Catholic young women in a medical career so that they might devote themselves to the women of India, who could not be treated by men doctors. All doors were open to her since her family was well known. Her father, Duncan McLaren, had been a member of Parliament for Scotland; her stepmother, Priscilla, was the sister of John Bright ; her home, from her earliest infancy, was a rendezvous of men and women earnestly interested in social problems. In her youth the Ragged Schools of Dr Guthrie occupied much of her time. Later she became an active member of the suffragette movement. The white slave trade was to her not something to be deplored as a necessary evil; she took active steps campaigning against it,, even so far as to interview the Queen of Spain on behalf of its abolition.

Already well on in the thirties, she became an active sympathiser and friend of Elizabeth Blackwell and her companions in their endeavour to study medicine and obtain degrees. With a natural aptitude for the care of the sick frequently seen in her family circle and her great desire to help suffering humanity, she herself decided to study medicine. As the licensing in degrees in medicine for women had not yet been sanctioned by Parliament, she went to France to study. She was the first and only woman at the Medical Faculty of Montpellier, but was treated with respect and consideration. In 1876 she graduated. In order to be able to practise in her own country, she took an examination in Dublin, then the only medical school in Great Britain to grant medical degrees to women.

Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which paved the way for the re-establishment of the Hierarchy twenty-one years later, brought no relief to the Religious Orders of men. Indeed it considerably increased the disabilities to which they had been so long subjected. Referring to Jesuits and members of other Orders, the Act states that ‘it is expedient to make provision for the gradual suppression and final prohibition of the same’. It goes on to enact that every member of such an order actually in England must register with the local clerk of the peace within six months, under penalty of £50 for each month of unregistered residence. Any member landing in England thereafter is to be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour and banished for life. It is made an offence, punishable by fme and imprisonment, to receive the vows of Religious in England or Ireland, and the person making vows is liable to banishment for life. An attempt to repeal these clauses was made in 1846, but without success. It is difficult to realise that when the Oxford Movement was in full flood the great Religious Orders were outlawed and doomed to extinction.

Time was to show that these vicious laws were still-born and would never be invoked. It is easy to be wise after the event. The years between 1829 and 1850 that achieved so much for the Church were, for the Religious, a time of grave anxiety and uncertainty. Their strength lay in their schools. It was only here that they could attempt any degree of community life, and it was from their schools that they hoped to draw recruits. The French Revolution had driven to England the schools that had for so long rendered distinguished service beyond the seas. Long before Emancipation the Benedictines were firmly established at Ample-forth and Downside.

During the nineteenth century the Christian conscience, what was left of it, had become increasingly uneasy by the sight of great poverty and great wealth existing side by side, by the problems presented in the fast growing industrial areas, by the sense that the poor had been dispossessed and that some form of restitution was due to them. John Buskin preached, William Morris practised, one or two rich young men took our Lord at his word and sold all that they had, many of the well-to-do gave much of their time and energy in ‘Social Service’, and men of good will supported charitable works according to their means. The ‘gay nineties’ saw the opening of many clubs for working men in poor parishes, the universities had their settlements or missions, and the late Canon Bartlett founded Toynbee Hall (Whitechapel) with a well planned educational objective. The normal cleavage of society into rich and poor had not then been recognised as constituting two distinct classes —employer and employed—with differing responsibilities to the State; that fateful distinction of status only reached the statute book with the passing of the insurance Act.

When you close the door behind you and start on a journey, something important begins to happen. You are making an act of faith in mankind. And if that seems too pompous a description, then at least let it be conceded that any journey is a trip to the unknown. The elaborately equipped explorer, setting out for Antarctic wastes or Himalayan mountains, is, we admit, asking for adventure, and we marvel at his news from nowhere when he returns. But the more modest wanderings of most of us—whether to the Pyrenees or the Italian lakes, or, for that matter, along the coast-line of Sussex or into the Shropshire hills: there seems little here for wonder. A stolen passport, a puncture, losing one’s way, whether on a map or on an unfamiliar menu—this is the small price we may have to pay for abandoning the safety of the holiday-camp or the boarding-house lounge on the front.

And yet the most staid of journeys is always more than it seems, for it is a human thing to do: with possibilities, therefore, which we can never guess at in advance. The most domesticated dog is incapable of travel: he is moved by the necessity of food and the demands of his kind. He is quite incapable of arriving, early or late. For travel is always a choice: something to be begun, and, let us hope, to be safely ended; but to be interrupted and altered, too. And it involves other people. However solitary a traveller may think himself to be, however silent he may stand on a peak in Darien, the point of his wonder, the purpose of his journey, is always in the end linked up with his freedom. He might have stayed at home, he might have crossed the mountains by another pass. And all would have been different.

Two conceptions of the world are struggling for the possession of the soul of man, the Christian and the Marxist. And it would seem that nothing can ever reconcile their antagonisms. The Christian vision of the world involves a triple transcendence; that of spirit over matter, of the human person over society, of God over the world; whereas the Marxist vision of that same world seems to be built on strictly corresponding negations. Spirit does not transcend matter, since it is matter itself that makes spirit; the human person does not transcend society, since man can only become truly himself in and through society; and God does not transcend humanity, since ‘it is not religion that makes man, but man who makes religion’.

Can a Christian content himself with such a rough and ready interpretation of Marxism? If it corresponds entirely to reality, then there is nothing more to be said and all doors are closed, since no possibility of a dialogue between Christians and Marxists can exist. There is a very real danger in simplifying doctrines, as theologians only know too well; and though Marxists are often guilty of crude generalisations about the Catholic position, Catholics themselves can over-simplify their assessment of the Marxist standpoint. ‘The low materialism, the shoddy history and the false messianism which made up Communist propaganda in the nineteenth century.... ‘I find these words in a Catholic manual of sociology published in recent months for use in schools. There is no doubt a certain satisfaction to be derived from using rude words about one’s opponents; but it is a game that two can play, and go on playing indefinitely. And one can ask oneself: is it a game that Christians should play.

My starting point will be some words of Bishop Hensley Henson, written in his Journal during the early stages of the Malines Conversations.

‘In the afternoon I read Pusey’s Life. His essay at negotiating a union with the Roman Church appears to have run the normal course, and experienced the normal fortune. Eager approaches from the Anglican side; non-committal compliments on the Roman; restiveness and reproaches in both camps; extravagant Anglican expectations, and then sharp disillusionment when the Roman authorities finally speak. I cannot doubt that the present essay will repeat the too familiar-history.’

If we discount a certain bias and exaggeration in the writer’s expression of opinion, it can hardly be said that his forecast was not a true one. Bishop Bell’s summing up in his account of the Conversations in Archbishop Davidson’s Life, though sympathetic and optimistic, does not in essentials differ from Bishop Henson’s.

‘Of their effect on the Church as a whole’, he writes, ‘Who can speak? There has been progress in understanding, in charity, in desire. So far as the longed-for rapprochement was concerned, the fundamental difficulties remain unsolved. But channels of thought and methods of study have been started, from which perhaps in later days some great gain may result.’

And now, once again, twenty-two years after the publication of the Malines Report, The Times correspondence of last November, on ‘Catholicism Today’, has revealed on both sides of the dividing line a deeply-felt desire for rapprochement, and a widespread sense that the way to increasing unity of heart and mind lies in the growth of friendly contacts and in conferences, on the theological level, between representatives of the different parts of divided Christendom.

I have often wondered how Communists can make their faith acceptable to their reason. Granted that in most cases the emotional forces released by their mystique leave little room for reasoning, yet man is a rational being and ultimately everybody is driven to rationalise, in however haphazard a manner, and thus to justify to himself the faith that is in him.

Most difficult of all to rationalise must surely be the ultimate foundation on which the whole structure of the Communist party rests, I mean belief in Stalin’s infallibility. And let it not be said that to use the term ‘infallibility’ is an exaggeration. Members of the Communist party are expected to hand themselves over entirely to its cause, to consider its claims as overriding those of any human tie, any interest, any personal conviction, and to be ready to sacrifice for it all they have or are, even their life. And for them this life is the end: they cannot be buoyed up by the expectation of any future reward, they cannot esteem this short present life of theirs as nothing compared with a future eternal life. They are pledged to an oboedientia cadaveris which for them is not a mortification of the will which brings its rewards, quite irrespective of whether the order obeyed is in itself right or mistaken, whether it will or will not further the end aimed at. Success—earthly success—is, for the Christian, suspect; for the Communist it is the only possible criterion.

For the Communist to hand himself over body and soul (as we would say) to the directives of the party can therefore only seem justifiable to himself, because only by following them does he think that success can be achieved. And the directives of the party are in the last resort of course those that are validated by Stalin. The course steered by Communism may be a zig-zag: it is for Stalin to say when the ‘zig’ is right, and when the ‘zag’. He is always right, unquestionably, because infallibly right.

There are at any one time about three thousand boys and young men in the Borstals of this country. They vary in age from sixteen to twenty-three years of age (for though a youth must be under twenty-one when he is sentenced, lie can be nearly twenty-four when he leaves). They vary also considerably in the degree of their experience of crime. They are rarely first offenders: if a boy is sent to Borstal on his first appearance in Court, it signifies either that his offence was very grave, or that he had in fact been committing offences for some time before he was caught. Most have been on probation, often more than once; many have been to Home Office Approved Schools. They have almost certainly been in the habit of committing offences for not less than twelve or eighteen months, and may quite easily have been doing so for as much as ten or twelve years.

They come from all over England and Wales, and from all walks of life, though the vast proportion are from the big cities, and from the working-class homes of those cities. There are a small number from criminal homes, where father or mother are known to the police; but in most cases the families are sound enough, and no other member has been in trouble. The broken home produces its quota, the home, that is, where one parent is missing by reason of death, desertion, separation or divorce: but in view of the number of such homes nowadays this is not as significant as at first might appear. One would need to know the statistics of such homes as against normal homes, and the number of good, honest young men who had been brought up in them, before one could form a sound judgment.

Educationally they range from the boy not far removed from mental deficiency to the boy of superior intelligence, though the latter is only one or two per cent of the whole. Most fall under the head of ‘average’. Brains are not a distinguishing mark of the criminal classes.