August, 1957: the great horse-shoe amphitheatre of the Sala Santitham, Bangkok—the last word in international conference halls—looked like a herbaceous border, so brilliant were the silks and saris of the women from fifteen Asian nations who had come to attend the Seminar organized by U.N.O. on the Civic Responsibilities and Increased Participation of Asian Women in Public Life.

Burma, Cambodia, China (or rather, Formosa), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaya, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sarawak, Singapore and Thailand had all sent participants, for in all these countries women now have the vote, and politics and the professions are open to them. Fifteen nongovernmental organizations sent observers; they included the Associated Countrywomen of the World, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the World Association of Girl Guides, the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Union of Business and Professional Women, and four Catholic bodies: Pax Romana, the World Federation of Catholic Young Women and Girls, the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations, and the Catholic International Union for Social Service at whose behest I was there. And I think I was the only European present.

When I looked over my programme, I realized that U.N.O. had indeed gathered together some of the most able women in the East. India had sent a member of Parliament and of the Constituent Assembly, a quick-witted person, never at a loss for a word; Cambodia, a Professor of Primary Education, distinguished by the quiet chic of her national costume and her sound commonsense.

The publication of Mr B. C. Roberts’s book on wages policy has revived academic interest in this subject, though there has never been any real possibility of a wages policy on the lines of those adopted in some other European countries, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, being accepted here. In these countries, the main responsibility for fixing wage rates has been given to a central body in the hope that this procedure would help to stabilize both wages and prices, thereby bringing the inflationary spiral to an end. As a secondary aim, it was hoped that centralized wage fixing would bring about a more equitable and rational wages structure than would free collective bargaining. In this country, though we have been faced with the same kind of economic problem, the trade unions have preferred to retain their traditional independence and freedom in collective bargaining.

The argument that a centralized wages policy will check inflation rests upon two assumptions: first, that rising money wages are a cause of inflation, and secondly, that centralized wage fixing will in fact lead to a stabilizing of wage rates and labour costs. The Cohen Report showed that personal incomes in this country, in which wages and salaries are the biggest item, have risen more rapidly than output since the war. Between 1946 and 1956, production rose on average by three per cent a year and the wage and salary bill by eight per cent a year. This, however, is not proof that wage increases have been the principal cause of rising prices, or that the wage increases have been the result of irresponsible demands by trade unions.

Christian unity is the concern of all these three books, and they are all of some importance; the first two for an understanding of the place of the Catholic Church in the ecumenical scene, and the third for the explanatory light it throws, from the Anglican side, upon the complex and debatable question of the Church of South India.

Mr J. M. Todd sets out to explain the relationship of Catholicism to the Ecumenical Movement. His book, the first of its kind in English and one which supplies a great need, includes a synopsis of the history and scope of this almost universal emergence, in the non-Catholic world during the past fifty years, of thought and action for Christian unity. It is written with a wide knowledge of the whole subject and with a deep conviction of the urgent importance of the ecumenical spirit as an essential element in the apostolate of the Catholic Church in the modern world. The essence of ecumenism is understanding; to seek out what is true in the beliefs, practices and values of those who differ from us and to make that the starting point of work for unity. We do not attempt, nowadays at least, whatever we may have done in the past, to convert the Chinese or the Hindu without the closest and most sympathetic study of what they already believe, and of the ethics and culture from which their beliefs issue and in which they are held and practised. We proclaim the Christian gospel as the true fulfilment of the aspirations which arise from these beliefs, and we take care to present it, as far as possible, in the atmosphere, idiom of thought and the clothing characteristic of the existing culture of those to whom we preach.

A recent book about the Islamic law of war and peace suggests comparisons with Christian law which have interesting implications. In this comparative field the plough has so far scratched only the surface. Among the more obvious questions provoked is this: does Christian law derive in this matter from Islamic law, or is the character of holy war always in all religions necessarily similar? Certainly such a book as this reminds us that the similarities between the Christian Crusade and the Islamic holy war—jihād—are more apparent than the differences. It also reminds us that certain general principles must be relevant to the question in any religion. One particular conclusion to which it seems to lead us is that any just war is a holy war. A war is either wrong, or a Crusade; the cause that is proportionate to the evils of war must be a great one indeed and one that claims our whole devotion. I am not, of course, concerned with the question whether there can be a just war at the present day; I only point out some alternatives.

War—struggle, aggression—is a condition of life, whether spiritual or material. Some people have been so unreasonable as to jibe at the combative character of pacifists. It is obvious enough that it is not war, but certain kinds of physical war, that all Christians abhor and some renounce. The holy war against evil angels, the struggle to live righteously, are as really warfare as the war of bombs.

‘While I, brought up to scoff rather than bless
And to say No, unless the facts require
A neutral verdict, for this once say Yes.’
(Louis MacNeice, Autumn Sequel.)

When the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia in 1401, they erected a triumphal monument with the skulls of the hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad who had not defended themselves.’ This quotation from Spengler begins Jacques Soustelle’s defence of French right-wing policy in Algeria (Le drame algérien et la décadence française. Réponse à Raymond Aron. Plon, 1957). The pamphlet might well have served the French left as a warning of how far Soustelle and his fellows were likely to go in defending their point of view. There is no such thing, proclaimed Soustelle—with some show of justification—as historical necessity, any more than there is such a thing as the inevitability of progress. There is no reason at all why we should believe in the ultimate triumph of Arab nationalism, of Pan-Arabism. A similar surrender to a feeling of inevitability in 732 would have stayed the hand of Charles Martel against the Moors, and in 1940 would have prevented de Gaulle from rallying the forces of Free France. There is no need to abdicate any position.

The historical references are a feature of Soustelle’s thinking which illustrate the fact that the revolt of May 13 was not entirely a question of Professors versus Colonels. Certainly in the case of Maurice Audin there is much more than a suspicion that the French army was willing to go to extreme lengths to silence intellectual opposition; but the civilian who espoused the army’s cause is himself an ex-academic of considerable ability who was, in addition, one of the first to join de Gaulle in 1940.

A First impression of Lourdes is never worth recording. The aeroplane touches down at Tarbes, the little pilgrimage climbs into a coach, the tarmac unrolls in all the secular splendour of a large main road. Arrival by train is only a more congested version of arrival by train at any crowded spa. And from either approach the city of Lourdes at first glance has nothing particularly striking to offer.

The pilgrim, in fact, must give himself time. Above all, he must draw no rapid conclusion, whether favourable or not. Lourdes is like a promontory thrust into the familiar dimensions of time and space and it is fitting to explore it slowly and with an awe appropriate to the act of investigation.

In the city itself incongruities abound. The air seems to rain medals, rosaries, postcards. Shops have unexpectedly nationalistic names, like ‘St Lawrence O’Toole’. Little notices on the counter announce Ici on cause wallon and great bazaars, like some reverential Woolworth’s, overflow with excellent people buying containers in plastic for Lourdes water, and tiny statuettes brightened with phosphorescent paint.

It is not usual, in this country at least, for Catholic moral philosophers and theologians to question the metaphysical status of the principles which they employ in their arguments. God and man are taken for granted, and morality is presented as a systematic description of the order which ideally obtains between them and of man’s defection from that order. The importance of such a procedure is hardly to be denied: a programme, a map of life, coherently and consistently recommended, answers immediately to our present perplexities. And yet these perplexities cannot all be satisfactorily resolved in a programmatic way. For our perplexities are not merely first-level perplexities, which may be defined in terms of a restricted number of possible courses of action in a world whose intelligible articulation is something securely achieved, and which may thus be resolved in terms of the recommendation of just one of these courses of action. Our perplexities are also (when they are acknowledged) second-level perplexities, concerned with the articulation itself, throwing into question the very nature of the order obtaining between man and God. Our morality cannot be wholly derived from a metaphysics established without explicit reference to morality. We can no longer merely insert our action into a programme; to attempt to do so, to refuse to admit the existence of second-level perplexity, is to evade a responsibility, the serious acceptance of which could and normally should creatively achieve a fresh, a more interior insight into our relationship to God by deliberately taking the strain of the question in order to offer an answer.