The population of South Africa has been formed by a series of migrations, all of them, if we except the prehistoric wanderings of the Bushmen and Hottentots, within recent times. The Native Africans came down from the central lakes within recent ‘saga’ memory. Their genealogies do not, of course, give dates. But probably 400 years covers the main movement. Among them came the invading Dutch and British. Other European races and, in large numbers, the Jewish people followed. There is a considerable number of Greeks and Syrians who, especially the latter but even to some extent the former, occupy a borderline position on the edge of the South African concept of ‘European’. Into this mixture large numbers of Indians and Malays, and a small number of Chinese, were imported.

It would take many thousand words to describe the mere categorisation of South African population, in which Natives, Coloureds, Asiatics and Europeans have each a separate position, and each their sub-divisions. So all that can be done for the purpose of this article, which is to give South African illustrations of the social-moral effects of movement of population, is to take certain special points of interest and let the many-sided background suggest itself in dealing with them.

To begin with, South Africa has no deported populations, no physically crossed immigrants. The only people who might be so called are the Jews, who are in a sense involuntary immigrants wherever they are. But their condition in South Africa is not sufficiently different from elsewhere to be of special interest.

After these things, Jesus went over the sea of Galilee, which is that of Tiberius . . . (St John 6, 1).

Let us think of these five barley loaves and two fishes. As you know our blessed Lord and Apostles had nothing. You will remember when our blessed Lord began to preach the redemption of the world he took care to begin at the beginning, the first thing necessary—‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. Religious life begins too with that poverty. Until that is right we have not begun right. We are in a sense not bound to pay more than other people (ten Commandments)—but we are more bound. For instance I might be bound to pay £50 to someone from whom I had stolen it. I might say, ‘Well I am such a wicked person that I will take a vow to pay it back’. I should not be bound to pay £60 because I’d taken a vow to pay, but I am more bound to pay the £50. Because I am bound in justice and also by vow. A great number of people can’t see that.

All the world is bound in justice to poverty, chastity and obedience. Not by vow, of course. Now if we, being bound more, commit a sin against poverty, chastity or obedience, we also commit a sacrilege, so that we are obliged because we have taken a vow. The primary thing is the poverty of our state. Now this is a very important thing, very simple.

Writing in the issues of this review for July 1944 and April 1945, I tried to explain the extremely complex set-up of peoples and Christian allegiances in the borderland that stretches from Lithuania to the Carpathians: that territory which was part of Poland-Lithuania from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, was partitioned between Russia and Austria in 1795, became Polish again from 1921 to 1939, and is now incorporated in the U.S.S.R. The inhabitants of the southernmost part, eastern Galicia (Galych, Halicz), are about one-third Latin Catholic Poles to three-fifths Ruthenians, i.e., Byzantine Catholic Ukrainians; and of these last I wrote that it seemed likely, in view of the circumstances and of historical precedent, that the Soviet authorities would seek to force them into the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually that process had already begun: in April 1945 all the Galician Ukrainian bishops were arrested and deported into Russia, and in March 1946 a handful of lower clergy and laity, calling themselves ‘The Synod of the Uniate Church in the Western Ukraine', reported to Marshal Stalin that the 350-year old reunion with Rome was revoked. It can hardly be doubted that the signal for this move was the death on the preceding November 1st of the archbishop of Lvov, Andrew Szepticky, who had not only been for forty-four years head of the Catholic Ukrainian church but for long the most respected and most loved of all Ukrainian public figures anywhere.

By the very fact of baptism men are incorporated into the one Church of Christ. A large number of Christians, it is true, do not consider themselves members of the Mother Church. Yet all those who were baptised in the name of the triune God outside the pale of the Catholic Church belong to her. Everyone wishing to baptise and doing so in the prescribed way, baptises validly, and anyone may do so in case of emergency. The Council of Trent has laid down that whoever denies that baptism, even if administered by heretics, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the Church does, is true baptism, shall be anathema. Anyone who has been validly baptised is and remains a member of the Apostolic Church. A son does not cease to be the child of his parents though he grows up far from his home. In like manner the character of regeneration and of membership in Christ, bestowed by baptism, is not obliterated, though a man be brought up in ignorance of Mother Church, without her instruction, and without receiving her other sacraments.

It has been said that baptism gives grace to live according to the precepts of the Gospel. Our separated brethren bear witness to this fact, in as much as they faithfully adhere to the Apostolic Creed, believe in the divinity of Christ, and keep the ten commandments; devoutly pray the Our Father, and in simplicity of heart make the teaching of Scripture the foundation of their lives.

The value of the theories of Freud, in dealing with juvenile delinquency (publicly debated recently) brings up the whole question of their assessment of the problem of abnormal moral behaviour. For Freud the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is something more than an allegory. It is also a code in which Mr Hyde figures with immense preponderance. ‘It is’, says Jung, ‘a detailed elaboration of man’s shadow-side such as had never been carried out before. It is the most effective antidote imaginable to all idealistic illusions about the nature of man’. (Integration of the Personality. Jung.) The conservative estimate of the theories of Sigismund Freud is that they contain much that is true and much that is new, but that unfortunately that which is true is not new and that which is new is not true. When Freud tells us that the media axiomata of the psycho-analytic theory of the mind rests on the assumption that the cause of all mental processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure-principle (Beyond the Pleasure-Principle), he merely declares himself a disciple of Epicurus. He merely proclaims that the object to which all men are attracted is Pleasure and that when a pleasure is consciously rejected it is only in order to make room (albeit unconsciously) for a greater pleasure. In other words, if we take ‘Pleasure’ in its broadest sense and define the word as meaning conscious satisfaction (not necessarily sensual, and often stimulated only by the prospect of benefit) there are few who do not subscribe to the obviousness of such a limited Hedonism.

I am going to define education simply as the process of making a man of a man, First, note that the thing is a process, that-is, something that takes time. In understanding any process the most important consideration is its end, and this we have said to be the perfection in his own kind of the person educated. We must notice further that any being of which it can be said that it is perfectible, in its own kind, can be perfect only in a relative and not in an absolute way. What is perfectible, even when perfect, will lack the perfection of having always been perfect. It will be perfect only in a particular kind, since what becomes must always be of a particular kind. God alone is perfect absolutely and hence the notion of education is not applicable to him, as it is to the pseudo-god of W. James. Further, what is perfect of its own kind or in a relative way, cannot be the sufficient reason for its own perfection. It must exist in view of that whose perfection is wholly contained in its own act of existence, that is in God. We may thus say that education is the process of making a man of a man because God is God. In other words, being a man makes no sense apart from God, being like whose perfection is the only perfection which a perfectible being can have.

To know what education is, therefore, we must know something about what man is and in order to know what man is we must know something about what God is . . .

Saint Paul insists, as we know, on the idea that the whole of Christianity depends on the fact of Christ's Resurrection. ‘If Christ has not risen’, he says, ‘our faith is vain and our hope groundless’, adding at once, ‘No, Christ really has risen from the dead, and I am witness to that’.

In Poland this thought of Christ’s Resurrection in addition to being a fundamental article of religious faith, had also a deeply patriotic and national meaning. During the period of enemy domination the feast of the Resurrection, the Christian Easter, became as well a symbol of national resurrection. Each of the faithful who spoke of the risen Christ, the conqueror over death, joined thereto in his heart another thought and sentiment—his lively and fundamental hope in the resurrection of Poland. That is what gave Easter, on both the traditional and the religious side, a very special colour which made its old popular customs still dearer, more intimate and more venerable. We do not know how the Easter festival can be observed in Poland at the present day, but we may be sure that no Pole behind the Iron Curtain ever lets go his steadfast hope of seeing his country really free and returning to life.

The season of Lent has had in Poland for centuries a special popular service, the singing of the Lamentation*, or Bitter Mourning for the Passion. This must not be confused with Tenebrae in Holy Week. It is sung in church several times a week, usually on Wednesdays and Fridays and also on Sunday evenings.

The present revival of Catholicism in Wales would be incomplete without the old devotion to the early Welsh Saints, of whose constant intercession for their native land we now begin to see the fruit. Though their cultus was forbidden at the Reformation, they have kept their place in the affection of the Welsh people; and the increased knowledge of their lives gained by modern scholars is a valuable help in restoring their rightful place in popular devotion. To the historian their chief importance is their formative influence on the Welsh nation, which, as is being increasingly recognised, grew out of Celtic monasticism, of which these Saints were the founders. Under Roman rule British Christianity had its centres in the cities and its organisation was interwoven with that urban life which was the framework of the imperial system. The decay of urban life after the departure of the Legions induced a period of stagnation in British Christianity from which it was rescued only by the monastic movement, which introduced a new organisation better able to adapt itself to the tribal system now replacing imperial administration. Thus it was Celtic monasticism which fused the British tribes and the remnants of Roman culture into a spiritual unity so that, from being a merely geographical term in Roman times, by the 8th century Britanni had become the name of a nation. That its ethos even today is essentially religious is the enduring legacy of the early Welsh Saints. It is not surprising, therefore, that the increasing study of their lives by modern scholars has been prompted by historical rather than by religious motives.

It is true that the Christmas message of Pope Pius XII was directed to international affairs but much that he had to say has a direct application to lower forms of government.

Division, insincerity, discord and mistrust are not faults that are confined to those politicians who parade on the international field but are to be found, perhaps to an even greater extent, among minor politicians. One may hope that the better men rise to the top and that among Members of Parliament there is a greater moral sense than is to be found in the general public.

In this country there must be nearly 64,000 councillors serving a wide range of authorities from the Parish Council to the glorious heights of the County Council.

A democracy depends on such people. They can be a defence against the abuse of power on the part of the central government. Governments do tend, as Pius XII points out, ‘once they have won power and feel the reins securely in their hands . . . (to) . . . gradually drop the veil and pass by successive stages from oppression of the dignity and liberty of man to the abolition of all authentic and independent religious life.’ This exaggerates the dangers present in our country, but no one, irrespective of his politics, who thinks about fundamentals, can deny that there are dangers. It can be argued that the present generation of political leaders will not abuse their power. Yet the power is there and can be abused, if not today then in a few years’ time.

In the material order, a man owns whatever he keeps; in the spiritual order, however, we own what we give away. The grace of election, given us so freely, is not bestowed upon us as if we were alone in the world, and without neighbours in sight; citizenship in the Kingdom of God is granted us that we may share it. No one can be a Catholic who is not a missioner at heart, who does not wish, pray, and work that all may be one in the Lord. And of all the apostolates, that to Israel is not the least. Her return to Christ is the last particular intention of our Octave, because it will be near the end of ages that the whole of the people comes to him. But though last in time, it is by no means last in rank.

The Church of Christ is the Israel of old, prolonged and extended—nay, renewed in youth like the eagle, enriched and fulfilled. ‘We are the House of Israel. We are Israel, the vineyard of the Lord,’ says an early Christian writer, (Pseudo Ambrosius, s. 58, n. 2; P.L. 17; 723) And another calls Abraham ‘the Father of the Church.’ St Augustine goes further; he makes the Church speak: ‘When God blessed Abraham, it was I he promised. The blessing of Christ, I am indeed spread through all the nations.’ (De Fide Rerum, 5; P.L. 40, 174) Each year, on Holy Saturday, before the blessing of the baptismal font, the Church herself remembers that in the Christian eon the miracles of old shine anew, and that what God’s mighty arm wrought when he freed from the yoke of Egypt the One People, he works now for the Gentiles in the waters of regeneration.

Poverty is an essential attribute of the good landsman. That is a truth that may easily be misunderstood, but it is a truth nevertheless.

It may be well to begin by dispelling some misconceptions. First of all it must be made clear that poverty is neither a synonym for destitution nor for financial failure. Poverty is a positive way of living that implies sufficiency, but rejects the accumulation of superfluities. It is indeed more than that. It is the inevitable result of the practice of charity, since Catholic teaching insists that ownership is not absolute, but must be limited by the needs of others. In this wider meaning of universal application obviously the landsman takes his place beside every other kind of worker. Charity is incumbent upon every human being, and is not the special perquisite of any particular kind of man. The landsman like everyone else may practise charity imperfectly or not at all, but, if he be a good landsman, he will at all events have created conditions for himself compatible with the practice of that greatest of the virtues—in a word he will be poor.

But there is another misconception that must be cleared away. Given freedom and the absence of unfair handicaps beyond his control, the good landsman will in one sense be rich. Not only will he enjoy food better in quality and more unrestricted in quantity than those who are out of touch with the land, but his production will always be in excess of his own needs.

Once he has crossed the Channel the continental very quickly discovers that the Church of England is quite unlike the protestant communities he knows in France or Belgium. Instead of bare conventicles he finds churches—very often fine ones, with altar, cross, statues, even red lamps in the sanctuary and confessionals. The liturgical vestments are similar to our own. Some of the services offer the same general characteristics. There are religious communities which are curiously like our monasteries both in their rule and in the piety, earnestness and influence for good of their members. If he is lucky the enquiring visitor may come into contact with members of the Anglican church quite close to his faith or come across theological works in which the vocabulary, the terms of reference and the subjects treated are familiar to him.

The hurried traveller will even be able to go back with the conviction that the things which separate us from the Anglicans are few. There is papal infallibility but this has doubtless been badly explained to them and since its definition the Popes have exercised it so little that Catholic theologians are not even all agreed as to its exact exercise. The Anglicans use an English liturgy? But there are many languages other than Latin in the Church of Rome. In short, he thinks, there are chiefly stupid misunderstandings and obstinacies. From this point to thinking that Be union is easy there is only one step, a step which is sometimes crossed and which is the cause of generous overtures doomed to failure.

There are at present two main parties among the Russian Orthodox emigrés. Some of them are in communion with the Patriarch of Moscow and accept his jurisdiction, while the rest stand aloof. The latter are suspicious of the apparently close connection between the Patriarch and the atheistic Soviet Government. The former are impelled by a sort of spiritual patriotism to give their allegiance to the Church of their homeland, no matter what its relations with the Kremlin. Either decision has often been taken only after much prayer and searching of the heart, and may have caused much bitterness.

A number of those who have submitted to the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow have been allowed to visit the Soviet Union on business connected with the administration of the emigre churches. After staying for periods varying from a few weeks to several months, they have returned to take up again their normal work in France or Belgium. Some of them are priests, others laymen. Most of them have been born in Russia but have lived since the Revolution in Western European cities, which makes their description of the conditions among Christians in the Soviet Union all the more interesting. Most of them are still much attached to their homeland and are very proud of the victories which Russia won during the war, though this does not entail approval of all that the present Russian Government says and does. They are pleased to be able to demonstrate their solidarity with their people.

In May 1939 the Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury humbly requested His Grace the President (in conjunction with the President of the Convocation of York) to appoint a Commission to consider the whole question of the revision and codification of the Canon Law. Later on in the summer of 1939 the Commission was appointed under the title “Canon Law Commission” by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Lang) in conjunction with the Archbishop of York (Dr Temple) with the following terms of reference:

A—To consider and report on the questions:

(1) What is the present status of Canon Law in England (a) as regards canons in force before the Reformation; (b) as regards canons made and promulgated since the Reformation; and (2) What method should be followed to determine which canons are to be regarded as obsolete and to provide the Church with a body of canons certainly operative and apart from which none would be operative or reasonably regarded as operative.

B—To prepare, if after such consideration this seems expedient, a revised body of canons based on the conclusions reached under A above, for submission to Convocation.

‘In order to make its conclusions intelligible to the ordinary reader the Commission has written much of its report in the form of a short history of Canon Law, dealing with its origins and the part which it has played in the life of the Church of England. The report is divided into seven chapters. Chapter I deals with the place of law in the Christian Church.

Immigrants and persons of recent immigrant stock are more quickly assimilated in American small towns than in cities for at least one quite evident reason. The size and complex organisation of the city allow immigrants to group together and continue in the practice of their folkways. Almost any American city of sufficient size has a number of ‘sections’—Italian, Hungarian, Polish, or other—the inhabitants of which continue to whatever extent is practicable the language, social customs, and even diet of their homelands. In the small town there do not exist the facilities for special ethnic ghettoes of this kind, and the person of foreign origin is compelled to make an adaptation to American ways of doing things simply as a matter of survival. In the ‘foreign sections’ of even small cities one will find persons who came in with the last great wave of immigration in the early 1900’s who still do not speak English—they live in a species of Limbo, without particular allegiance to their place of origin as a political and national entity, and enjoy only an economic nexus with their country of adoption. There is the classic story of the Chinaman who settled in the Polish quarter of Chicago and opened a laundry. After three years he felt that he had sufficiently mastered English to go on a sightseeing tour of the city. When he left his familiar neighbourhood he found that what he spoke was good idiomatic Polish.

A Priest remarked recently that the education authorities had no intention of taking away their schools from Catholics, but merely of making it impossible for them to be continued. In that he was only expressing what has become obvious to everyone who has had much to do with the administration of the Education Act of 1944.

First, there are questions of conscience to trouble the teacher. Morally he or she is responsible to the parents; legally to the education authority. Already problems are being posed that make for conflict between the two loyalties. The teacher’s duty is clear; the choice may not appear similar to that which faced St John Fisher and St Thomas More, but it becomes so when it is a question of refusal to sacrifice principles that are rooted in the Faith. The penalty for refusing may not be so great, but as time goes on the testing may well become more severe.

There has been reason for disturbance in the proposed Schools ‘Record Card’. This has been described as a ‘secret dossier’. It was recommended by the Report of the Committee on the Juvenile Employment Service, and its basic suggestions were accepted by the Government, and have begun to be implemented by some local authorities. The Report required comprehensive information about every child, including not only his or her attainments but details about character, use of leisure, and a report on the home and parents. This was described as ‘a highly confidential document’. One form issued bore the heading that it would ‘under no circumstances be communicated to parents’.

The birth of an innumerable quantity of new generations I cannot reconcile us to the death of one single man.’ These words of Nicolas Berdyaev come towards the end of one of his latest works to be translated into English, The Russian Idea; and it has since transpired that they were written also near the end of his own life. They may serve as a fitting epitaph to the life and work of one who will not easily be replaced, and whose labour of interpreting the Russian world to the West was among the most pressing tasks of our generation in a field in which the labourers are still tragically few. His passing, therefore, is at once a blow and a challenge. We have lost one who undertook what few are willing, and fewer still are equipped, to do. But because the work must be done, it behoves us indeed not to be reconciled to his death, but rather to be emboldened by it.

It is difficult in the stormy moment of an historical crisis to reflect at all calmly on the deeper issues below the surface of the political and military hubbub. Thought about the Russian question is almost paralysed by the very fact that everybody is thinking about it. The temptation to reduce a complex conflict to the simple categories of friend and enemy, of ‘them’ and ‘us’, necessarily destroys that effort to find common ground or at least to understand the motives and purposes of the beloved enemy.

The achievement of which St David has become the symbol and patron stands out like a mountain massif on a starlit night. The detail is obscure, but the patient work of historians, geographers, archaeologists, philologists and the experts in place-names, church dedications and folk-lore are gradually having their effect. The main peaks are already clear and unmistakable. Furthermore, this achievement, as we consider it, serves to emphasise that truth on which wisdom has always insisted—the futility of paying attention to the ignis fatuus of immediate success and failure. First, however, the setting must be grasped. By the year 400 Stilicho had pacified and reorganised Britain; he then withdrew the regular legionary troops. The problem of the western hill-country, much of which had been occupied by Goidelic pirates and settlers, was left, it would appear, to Cunedda, who probably held the office of the Dux Britanniarum. He was, it would seem, the commander of a corps of foederati who had been settled beyond the Wall of Hadrian. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather all bore Roman names. His grandfather, Paternus, was surnamed Bais rudd, of the Red tunic, which denoted probably the official purple of Rome; and it has been suggested that his great-grandfather, Tacitus, had been a protege of Constantine the Great. The mixture of Celtic and Roman names appears among his sons.

Cunedda’s expedition was a success. In conjunction, probably, with the Ordovices of Powys, he and his sons expelled the Goidels from the greater part of Wales.