Money-dealings to the religious temper of the Middle Ages were somewhat like sex-activities to that of the nineteenth century and after: they were a pity, but could be excused. Now as the condemnation of usury by canonists and moralists was based on a reading of the rôle of money afterwards displaced by another, on the rôle of capital investment, and the first was allowed to stand even when it was no longer applied to a changed economic structure, so the traditional arguments about sex are based on a reading of its function which simply does not fit in with our changed social structure. The old premise was that the primary purpose of sex was the preservation of the race. Once upon a time this was true, but not now. There is a new situation: science has enormously diminished the dangers of a pregnancy, infant-mortality, and famine; machinery supplies for a large labour-force and State welfare for the parents’ education of their children and the children's care for them; psychology enhances values in sex formerly relegated to secondary purposes; domesticity itself demands wider spacing and the standard of living for whole nations a lessened birth-rate. Let Catholic theologians then, instead of appearing evasive by the distinction they draw between contrivance and contrivances and by allowing intercourse more certainly destined to be childless than the contraception they forbid, instead of tinkering with their old apparatus and adjusting it to ‘rhythm’ and other methods which do not touch the heart of the problem, just leave it intactfor what it is worth, like the condemnation of usury, and address themselves to afresh statement adapted to modern conditions. They are not invited to preach a new morality, but to revise their arguments which appeal to reason, and to take a more balanced view of the conclusions that have been drawn from them.

This appears an unambiguous title; we talk frequently, both about ‘prevention’ and ‘family breakdown’. Yet if we reflect on each of these terms there are good reasons for doubt and uncertainty. Does the death of a father constitute the breakdown (or break-up?) of a family? Has a family in which the eldest child is unloved by mother and overprotected by father broken down? Or a family from which the mother is away in mental hospital, possibly for a short time? In brief do we use the term to refer to the lack of the physical wholeness of a family or to a failure in one of the essential functions of the family? If we refer to both these features at the same time it is likely that the term is being stretched beyond its usefulness.

If we turn to the other term in the title, prevention, the lack of clarity is much more in evidence. The idea of prevention has a long history as far as public provision for social welfare is concerned. It is possible to observe at least three stages in the development of this idea. Firstly, it was considered that people should be prevented from recourse to dependence on such social provision as existed by the availability early in life of certain guiding influences. Thus, education was seen ‘as one of the most important means of eradicating the germs of pauperism for the rising generation and of securing in the minds and morals of the people the best protection for the institutions of society’.

I have been asked to write some account of the Church’s life in the West Indies, and how it is affected by changes taking place thick and fast in these islands. I say that I have been asked, because I would certainly not have tried to do so on my own initiative. I mean by this that I feel a priest is the one least able to see and judge the situation at such a level, and that for two reasons. The first is a purely personal, silly one. It is that one becomes so accustomed to people and things here as elsewhere that it is an effort to stand back and look at them. When I first came here, I learnt the names of streets, shops, government departments, various other places. I have to ‘think’, now. I go to them, that’s all, without thinking of their names. Not only names, but things that would strike the stranger at once, are precisely the things not noticed later on. Unbelievably so. A young woman came to ask for an interview with the Bishop who was out. I took her name, and made the appointment, and informed the Bishop later on. Not recalling the person, he asked me to describe her. He still didn’t remember, and then suddenly asked—‘You didn’t mention; was she black, or brown, or white?’—and was very understandingly amused: I confessed, I couldn’t say! I just hadn’t noticed.

It is all very unhelpful, I realize, but it is the only answer that can sometimes be given: ‘I dunno. I just live here’.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, has given free hand to the Indian ruling classes in their campaign against the Indian babies. Under the unofficial, yet distinctly recognizable, leadership of Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, wife of India’s prominent banker and diplomat, the male and female representatives of wealth and high society gather around the banner of ‘The Family Planning Association’. With official blessings they hold meetings and distribute their propaganda with the avowed purpose of pressing for more drastic measures against over-population.

Progress has been made during the last ten years; from moderate beginnings with the advocacy of the ‘safe period’, the Association and the Health Ministry went on to endorse artificial contraceptives and sterilization, so that today there is a growing demand for legalized abortion. No Tibetan crisis or Chinese threat is capable of turning these people’s minds from their single goal—the decimation of future Indian generations.

Justification is provided by the humanitarian and patriotic motives that inspire their relentless struggles against the natural expansion of the race. Arguments are invoked about world peace, which is to be promoted by their efforts; others claim that population limitation is vindicated on religious grounds because it prevents millions of souls ‘cascading into perdition’.

For many it has already become a way of life, and an end in itself that no longer requires any theoretical or practical justification. As one of the ladies at a recent meeting of the Family Planning Association summed it up: ‘We are on the lookout for children everywhere. Where there are children there must be parents.

The most important factors in any home are the people in it and the relationships between them. This paper is, however, mainly concerned to discuss other aspects of home making because it was originally delivered at a conference at which the strains and stresses of human relationships within a family were covered by other papers.

Let us look first and very briefly at the economic factor. How do we reconcile the contradictory views of our society which are from time to time presented to us, an affluent society on the one hand, slums and poverty stricken homes, on the other.

Some recent figures of average earnings published by the Ministry of Labour are significant. These include overtime, nightwork and bonuses; they cover both skilled and unskilled workers in industry, mining and quarrying and transport, but do not include employees of the National Coal Board and the National Dock Labour Board for whom separate statistics are given. The figures are based on returns made during one pay week published in February 1961. The heaviest concentration of earners lay between £12 and £14 and more than half earned between £9 and £15. Average earnings in these industries as published last February were £14. 17s. for manual workers and £14.19s. for weekly paid clerical and administrative staff. A very few (0.42 per cent) earned less than £7 and about 5 per cent earned less than £9, all these figures refer to what is described as full time adult work. Skilled craftsmen could well earn a good deal more than the average, but the unskilled man might earn a good deal less.

The English visitor, returning from America, seems rarely to have found much to praise. Dickens, Trollope, Kipling—to mention only the Victorian big guns—cast a dyspeptic glance on the continent and found it wanting. ‘Hell with the lid off’, was Dickens’ judgment on Pittsburgh, and Kipling found little sign of gracious living in New York.

Travellers, it is true, can always find some evidence to confirm their own prejudices, and the Americans—in this, as in all else, a generous people—are liberal in providing it. Thus, innumerable films have prepared one for the usual Mid West town, but it is still a surprise to see it articulated, to realize that the image is not a Hollywood set inspired by a reading of Sinclair Lewis. A sort of Slough extending to infinity: it can underline the story of the man arriving at an American airport late at night, who, having booked in at the universal convention hotel, had to telephone room service in the morning to discover where he was. But generalizations of this sort are singularly unfaithful to the essential American fact. The Main Street snapshot, with its drive-in cinema and its ten-cent store, is as misleading as the British Tourist Board’s advertisements suggesting that England is all cottages with roses round the door.

Since 1950, the American novel has undergone a subtle and almost unnoticed change; there has been a break in the continuity of tradition. Before World War Two, writers like Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe could be placed by cultural historians into categories, and literary antecedents could be found: Mark Twain for Hemingway, for instance, or Walt Whitman for Wolfe. But since the war, or perhaps more accurately, since the Bomb, a kind of novel has appeared which is entirely different from the main, and even from the minor or eccentric, traditions.

True, the influence of Hemingway can be seen clearly (though in a much diluted and brutalized form) in the hard-boiled detective novel, and Thomas Wolfe has had much to do with the pose and prose of Jack Kerouac and James Jones. But the most significant works of writers like Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Wolfe had all been completed by the end of the war.

Since then, there have been no novelists of their stature. Nonetheless, there have been some writers of promise: James Gould Cozzens (By Love Possessed), Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), Frederick Buechner (A Long Day's Dying), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park), and J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye). Both Cozzens and Wouk had relatively unnoticed pre-war careers. Indeed, their post-war careers were largely due to the political climate; each of them wrote non-experimental narratives in a reactionary, conservative, narrowly authoritarian tone during the McCarthy era. Novelists like Paul Bowles and Frederick Buechner were too esoteric, strained and mannered to contribute meaningfully to a living art form.

The Orthodox Churches are unanimous in their hostility to the existence of Catholic Churches of Byzantine rite. They fear that Catholicism seen within the framework of the rite that they know must needs be more attractive to Orthodox people than when seen within the framework of the unfamiliar Latin rite. But this tactical objection is not the only one. Behind it lies a deeper conviction, two convictions in fact.

First, there is the conviction that it is the Orthodox Churches, and not the Roman Church, that have remained wholly and completely faithful to Christ’s teaching and to the tradition of the Apostles and the primitive Church. This is so much so that in Orthodox eyes to make an act of adhesion to the Roman communion is to give up something of the revealed faith and to cut oneself off from the true Church founded by our Lord Jesus Christ. We believe this conviction is mistaken, and we indeed have good reasons for doing so. But we must recognize that it is a conviction that governs the Orthodox attitude.

The other conviction is connected with the first one. It is that the Roman Church is not and cannot be anything but the patriarchate of the West, whose head is the bishop of Rome; she is therefore of her very nature, as it were by definition, limited to the Churches of the Latin rite.

The year 1962 has seen a remarkable step forward here in England in the recognition of ‘unity’ or ‘reunion’ work as ‘a particular charge and duty of the Church’; an ‘excellent work’, which ‘should daily assume a more significant place within the Church’s universal pastoral care’. In these words the Instruction of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office on the Ecumenical Movement describes the place of Catholic Ecumenism in the Church’s apostolate. This important Papal document was published in December 1949. It was addressed to Local Ordinaries, the Bishops of the Church, and its first concern was to remind them that Bishops, whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God, ought to make this ‘reunion’ work a special object of their care and attention. They must not only use great diligence in keeping it under effective supervision, they must also give it prudent encouragement and direction, with the twofold purpose of assisting those who are in search of truth and the true Church, and of shielding the faithful from the dangers which so easily accompany the progress of this movement.

To implement this directive of the Holy See more effectively the hierarchy of England and Wales appointed from among their number, a year ago, a committee for Unity to represent them in the guidance and promotion of unity work. The President of this committee is Archbishop Heenan of Liverpool, and he and his fellow bishops who are members of it have lost no time in getting to work on their important task. It is this that is responsible for the considerable movement forward of Catholic Ecumenism in England which this year is witnessing. Several meetings have been organized, with the committee’s sanction, of Anglican and Catholic scholars, for the discussion of ecumenical questions at a deep theological level.

A death struggle can also be a struggle for life, a new birth. Perhaps the present crisis is the birth agony of a new world. Let us hope that it is. No one can dare to predict what is about to be born of our confusion, our frenzy, our apocalyptic madness. Certainly the old order is changing, but we do not know what is to come. All we know is that we see the many-crowned and many-headed monsters rising on all sides out of the deep, from the ocean of our own hidden and collective self. We do not understand them, and wecannot. We panic at the very sight of their iridescent scales, their jaws that flame with nuclear fire. But they pursue us relentlessly, even into absurd little caves fitted out with battery radios and hand-operated blowers. We find no security even in the spiritual cave of forgetfulness, the anaesthesia of the human mind that finally shuts out an unbearable truth, and goes about the business of life in torpor and stoical indifference.

And yet the monsters do not have to come to life. They are not yet fully objective like the world around us. They do not have the substance which is given to things by the creative power of God: they are the spiritual emanations of our own sick and sinful being. They exist in and by us. They are from us. They cannot exist without us. They are our illusions. They are nightmares which our incredible technological skill can all too easily actualize. But they are also dreams from which we can awaken before it is too late. They are dreams which we can still, perhaps, choose not to dream.

The University of Fribourg is a characteristically Swiss institution. It is not merely that it is situated in the capital of a proudly independent canton where two traditions in Switzerland, represented by the French and German languages, meet. The very notion of a University where nearly half of both students and professional staff are foreigners is true to the national tradition of world service. Although the world service consisted for many centuries in supplying mercenaries for the armies of Europe, it is now best represented by the Red Cross and the various organizations concerned with world co-operation. To understand the spirit of the University and appreciate its worth one must understand something of its setting.

Clarity is one of the most striking features of the country: perhaps it is the clarity of the air which produces clarity in other respects. The cleanliness of the trains and the hygiene of the hospitals are well-known. One might ascribe this merely to a passion for neatness, an impatience with lack of order. But I think this would be unjust, in spite of some features which suggest this interpretation. The steely fingers of bureaucracy extend over the land, cutting across even the treasured individualism of the cantons, to an extent which even the obedient Englishman would find difficult to stomach.

The discussion of the Government’s incomes policy has overshadowed discussion of the setting up of the National Economic Development Council. This is hardly surprising. Every individual is not only very concerned with what goes into his pay packet, he is also fully aware of what is happening to it. Economic growth, inflation and a host of other factors, may have just as great a bearing on his standard of living as the amount of cash he actually takes home, but, for all that, it is a less obvious bearing. Nevertheless, the question of economic growth is a vital one for each individual, and for the community as a whole. Moreover, it is a question that is intimately connected with the subject of incomes policy. In the present article, economic growth will be considered under three headings. The first is the desirability of economic growth; the second, the facts which account for slow or rapid growth; and thirdly, the possibility of framing a policy for more rapid growth in Britain.

Since the war, Britain has been faced with the problem of inflation. During the war, inflation occurred because of the very heavy Government spending on war materials, a restricted supply of civilian goods for consumption, and a reluctance to raise taxation to the level where it would have left civilians with just enough money to buy the greatly restricted supply of civilian goods available. Many economists thought that the high level of personal savings (which did much to keep inflation from getting entirely out of hand) would prove a useful defence against any post-war depression.

In one of his novels—II Conformista, I think it was—Moravia makes the hero reflect that everything can be understood except existence. The observation is pointed enough to start one reflecting on this interesting and influential writer; it offers, I think, a clue, slight at first glance but likely to repay attention, to Moravia’s mind and habits of thought and even, implicitly, to the way he poses and attempts to answer the fundamental moral question: what is the right discoverable term of human desires?

To say that everything except existence is intelligible sounds like a way of declaring oneself an intellectual, in the sense of one who has a large confidence in reason; but also, at bottom, an intellectual agnostic, for the fact of existence itself is declared unintelligible. But let us note, first, the rationalistic temper. Moravia is a man who tends to place knowledge above all other values. In a recent interview arranged by a popular weekly, on being questioned about the erotic stress in his work, he came out with this: ‘sex is above all a means to knowledge’; and it is obvious from Moravia’s novels that the knowledge he speaks of here presupposes, besides immediate experience, a great deal of rational analysis. This is not to say that the many pages of explicitly reflective analysis that occur in his novels are always convincing, either in themselves or in their context: the prostitute Adriana’s reflexions in La romana (The Woman of Rome) offer easy game to the critic in this latter respect; but simply that Moravia’s is the sort of mind that does not rest until it has distinguished every experience into its components and so gained lucid rational control—or what he takes to be such—over each aspect and phase of life. At his best Moravia is certainly a formidable analyst of character, mood and situation.

That most expensive of all museum requisitions—Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer’—is in its way an authentic symbol of American culture, and that not merely because of the cash it cost. The picture, with its grave evocation of one generation contemplating another, of one genius paying homage to a predecessor, sums up the seriousness of American interest in the arts—a seriousness, however, which is constantly in need of reassurance. It is not enough to respond to the beauty of a painting or of a symphony: they have their public place, their established share by this in the American image, and they should be made to appear so.

Nowhere in the world are there such temples set up to the glory of the arts, and new and exciting projects, such as the Lincoln Centre in New York, will give fresh and overwhelming evidence of how much Americans care for their heritage, which is no longer simply the possession of old masters or the establishment of superb orchestras and opera. Art is to be used, and the lending services attached to every gallery as well as the huge popular response to concerts, not only in Philadelphia and New York, but in Cleveland, Minneapolis and many places besides, are proof of a genuine and generous interest.

One of the most remarkable features of the Church’s life today is its persistent and widespread effort to return to the springs of that life. In every domain—biblical, liturgical, catechetical—there is a desire to rediscover the sources in their freshness, to re-animate the Church with the primitive vitality, and power which enabled it to reach out all over the world. So far as biblical studies go, this effort finds one concrete expression in archaeological and anthopological research into the history of the Jewish people. The object of this research, as Fr Joseph Bourke, o.p., suggested in his recent ‘Survey of Old Testament Studies’ in this review, is to reconstruct the ‘living context’ in which the Old Testament traditions were originally formulated.

It is remarkable to find that this concern for the revival of the past also exists in the African continent. Anthopologists in Africa are more and more interested in the study of African culture, and particularly African religion and ritual, not in order to reject them but to re-discover virgin Africa. Seized by the passion for négritude, this movement to renew negro-African culture, occurs just at the moment when Africa is opening out into modern life, and seeks to advance but realizes it cannot do so without returning to the authentic roots of its history.

In his recent novel Island Mr Aldous Huxley says some very silly things about St Augustine, or to be quite fair he makes one of his ‘wiser’ characters say them. From them it can be deduced that all he actually knows about Augustine is the Confessions, or a vague impression about that work, massa damnata, and unbaptized infants. This is probably representative of what the average educated man knows about Augustine, and so he will readily accept Mr Huxley’s dismissal of the man as a neurotic rigorist predestinationist. But the average educated Englishman cannot be excused this absurd misconception much longer, for what is in fact a monumental biography of St Augustine, Augustine the Bishop by Professor F. Van der Meer, is now available in English. Describing Augustine’s death the author says this about him: ‘To his Church he bequeathed two things; the memory of his humble and indescribably lovable personality [so much for the neurotic pessimist], and his great library, the archive of his spirit’ (p. 274).

It is quite clear that Dr Van der Meer knows that library inside out, and that he has read every word of Augustine’s letters and sermons, which are the most self-revealing of his works. And so in an immensely readable 589 pages (excluding notes) he substantiates over and over again the humble and indescribably lovable personality of his hero. I feel bound to say that it seems a pity that the publishers have presented his work in a volume that is handsome indeed, and well printed, but whose weight (3 lb.) and price (£4 10s) can scarcely fail to deter many possible purchasers and readers. The book is really a classic. It has had to wait almost twenty years for translation into English - understandably, perhaps.

A drawing of Dante on the dust-cover of this new study of the Divine Comedy gives the poet a slightly Oriental look—and is that a helmet he is wearing? The suggestion, anyhow, of the Mongolian and the martial, whether intended or not, may perhaps be linked with the fact that the author is a young North Korean who served with distinction in the Korean army against the Communists before going to America to study philosophy at Yale. Mr Swing is a convert to the Catholic faith and, to judge from this book, his Dante studies have a good deal to do with his religion. He has fed his mind on the strong Christian meat of the Comedy: it has formed in fact his introduction to theology, and he now repays the debt with a theological introduction to it. And because his mind is exceptionally vigorous and original, and because he is very well acquainted with Dante’s poem (though not, I think, with its literary and historical background) he has given us an extremely interesting and even valuable book. So much had better be said at once, and emphatically, because it would be only too easy to multiply objections in detail to Swing’s work, while missing or only half-appreciating its merits as a whole. It is likely to irritate scholars—that irritable race—and on the other hand it takes its subject too seriously to prove easy reading for people who do not already know the Divine Comedy fairly well. Thus it may in effect fall between two stools, leaving the scholars full of their ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, and the others somewhat bewildered. And that, I am sure, would be a pity; but before I go on to say why, it may be of interest to glance round the field which our young Korean critic has entered as a newcomer.

Probably very few people accept the ‘political’ arguments against British participation in the nuclear deterrent system; the arguments that British unilateral nuclear disarmament will encourage an Afro-Asian movement leading to multilateral disarmament, and that, whether or not the present Western deterrent is immoral, Britain is entitled to withdraw from it and expel its bases in order to cut down her risks in the event of war actually breaking out. But the traditional teaching of the Church on war and murder suggests to many Catholics that the deterrent system involves immoral risks and intentions, and must therefore be rejected on these grounds whatever the consequences may be. Now that this traditional teaching on war and murder is being clearly set out, fewer and fewer people will be able to hold that it is inapplicable to modern conditions. Yet, given this teaching, the current arguments from risks and intentions are still not strong enough to convince the majority who support nuclear deterrence. As the Revd. A. Kenny pointed out recently, even Mr Stein’s symposium has not quite succeeded in refuting the ‘theory of deterrence by bluff’: it is not selfevident that the risks involved in nuclear deterrence are too heavy to take; and because it is very difficult to show that Western governments themselves have an immoral intention to use the deterrent weapons immorally in certain circumstances, it would have been better if the symposiasts had pointed to the fact that, if the operators of the deterrent must be ready to act on governmental orders to launch the weapons against normal cities at a moment’s notice, then it is psychologically impossible for them, at least, not to have immoral intentions.