The meetings and conferences of May 1st and the coming anniversary of the encyclical Rerum Novarum make this subject one of actual up-to-date interest, because of what has been said of the Church as allied to capitalism and of the contrary statement issued in that well-known document which set all Catholic thought and action in motion against this social malady.

We refer to that economic organism, independent of and superior to business and businessmen, which arises out of the accumulation of fortune and an ever-increasing concentration of wealth, stretching over four centuries, and which has resulted in modern capitalist enterprise as distinct from that enterprise which united capital and labour. Here—according to the most authoritative scientific definition—we have ‘the reign of capital represented by money and securities, which can be quickly concentrated anywhere’; in almost every country the predominance of this phenomenon as a basic rational form of economic life’; here we see a distinct cleavage between those who provide capital and those who contribute to production solely by their work—a double-faced thing, one side of which shows a system of economic relations in which the upper classes who possess the means of production are predominant; while the other side shows an illicit function of capital, evil in its origin, disproportionate in its realisation, harmful in its effects—a veritable social cancer: the formation of a non-specific cellular proliferation, its continuous and progressive growth governed by laws of its own, differing from those of normal tissues, independent of the organism in which it grows and develops, and on account of this independence and expansiveness, parasitic and deadly.

The teaching and attitude of the Catholic Church concerning this fearsome phenomenon, as in respect of peace and against war, may be seen throughout history.

It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. When, however, what is to be surveyed is the dimly lit and sometimes treacherous field of inter-action between religion and politics, only the most confident of observers would lay claim to any privileged insight. And yet these musings at a monastery window, which is all they can pretend to be, may not wholly lack interest; they are an attempt to glean something of the significance of the contemporary scene in the light of ultimate principles. But the process will demand of us a certain corporate self-scrutiny, and of this a word must be said.

The divine constitution of the Catholic Church, indefectible in its essence and hierarchic in its structure, necessarily precludes any criticism by its members of the Church itself. It is not our business— nor, if we are wise, should it be our wish—to call in question what God has ordained. But the mental attitude engendered by this state of things, one of unquestioning acceptance, can sometimes extend beyond its due limits .and so lead us to leave unexamined what in fact has every claim to searching attention. It is important to know, for example, to the extent that the thing can be ascertained, how far the Church in this or that particular country embodies all that is implied in Catholicism, or how far circumstances of time and place, not excluding the personal limitations of its members, seem to hamper the flowering of the full Christian life.

Has there ever been such a general sense of frustration as the world is suffering from today? I think not. In Pagan times this state of mind was certainly unknowm. People had bad luck, no doubt quite often, and keenly regretted it: but they never felt frustrated, for there was no basic, fundamental expectation which had got the bottom knocked out of it. Pagans knew that the gods were jealous and that a run of good luck and success was sure to break sooner or later. Or else, as the Hindu would put it, if he had a rough time, it was just his bad Karma; he was now merely paying in this life for the ill deeds he had committed in a previous’ one. Bad luck or bad Karma in neither case admitted of a sense of frustration.

In Christian times obviously there was no room for frustration either. What was this life but a vale of tears, a pilgrimage to one’s true home in another world? And if one did not expect anything better, how could one feel frustrated? Even when Christendom came to pieces and life became more and more secularized and paganized, the concept of frustration was absent. The eighteenth century witnessed the discovery of steam power and the ushering-in of the machine age: soon God was declared to be a hypothesis, which was no longer required, and man, instead of waiting for a better world beyond the grave, now began with his newly discovered powers to construct a better world right here.

Peter Maurin was 72 years old when he died on May 15th, 1949. He was born in a small French community, 200 miles from Barcelona, one of a family of 28 children. His own mother died after giving birth to five children, and his father married again and there were eighteen more children. Amongst them now there are four teachers, three carpenters, some farm hands. Some of his sisters are nuns and some of his brothers are members of religious orders.

Some years ago Peter gave the following facts:

‘My mother’s name’, he said, ‘was Marie Pages. She died in 1885. Of her five children only I and Celestin, a brother who was eighteen months younger than I, and my sister Marie, two years younger than my brother, were left. My whole name is Aristide Pierre. Pierre was my grandfather and my godfather. He died at the age of ninety-four and he was never sick. He worked in the fields until he was eighty-five, and after that he could not because of his eyes. So he stayed home and made baskets and recited his rosary. He liked to work. He knew it was good for him.

‘The last I heard of my brother he was the, head of a school in Paris, St Clotilde’s, a parish school. He had been a Christian Brother, but when they were secularised they no longer wore the garb but went on teaching just the same. One of my half-brothers taught for the Christian Brothers’ school and he was married to a school teacher who taught in the public school.

The Problem of Evil, as we all understand it, is a Christian problem. It does not in fact arise till we accept a sovereign reality, at once absolutely good, or rather loving, and at the same time infinitely powerful, behind the diverse realities of the world. Now this supposition has never really taken root in men's minds outside Christianity. It is when this conception comes up against the unhappy facts of human experience that the problem of evil—at first a scandal—arises; ‘If there is a God all-powerful and all-loving behind this world, how can he make his creatures suffer so?’ But it is important to add that even inside Christianity the problem has taken two profoundly different forms. One was quietly ignored by the first Christian centuries, yet modern minds now seem to know no other and it is this that, we believe, is the problem of evil. That Christian theory of evil which seems to have finally prevailed since the XVIth century regards evil as an abstraction, as opposed to the Manichean doctrine which made of it a thing. But, in distinction to both, the older Christian idea rather denounced in it a person. I should suggest that the phrase ‘problem of evil’ does not in fact suit the older form of thought; it should be rather ‘problem of the Evil One’; and it is quite significant to recall that the ‘Libera nos a malo’ of the Our Father which we translate now as ‘deliver us from evil’ used to be translated always as ‘deliver us from the Evil One’. (In some European languages the struggle between the forms still continues.)

When two societies which are only materially distinct from each other come into collision neither is to be sacrificed to placate the other, but the interests of each are to be catered for in a rigidly fair manner.

This principle is based on the fact that these two societies are of equal standing, enjoy therefore identical rights and have neither of them any legal advantage over the other; neither in fact is obliged to waive any of its rights in favour of the other. On this account a balance in no way derogatory to either must be struck as accurately as is possible between the conflicting rights; for example, by dividing up the disputed matter (granted it is divisible) or by making compensation. At times indeed the right claimed on one side may be a putative one only, and that on the other side clearly unimpeachable (objective); or at least one rather than the other may have a greater interest at stake or stronger grounds on which to quarrel. But even in situations such as these, peaceful methods of settling the issue must take precedence over all others.

First of all, therefore, every effort should be made to establish the existence of whatever right is being claimed; then an attempt should be made to compose differences amicably; finally, should this fail, war must not be declared without first trying out certain coercive measures which, though of less consequence than war, may be equally effective in the circumstances.

The ruined Parthenon, as it stands in the lucid splendour of the Athenian sky, enshrines for us not the adolescent worship for which it was designed but the philosophy and art of ancient Greece. It stands as their symbol. In the grove of Mambre, four millennia old, is the tomb of Abraham, our father, where obedience to the one high God lies sleeping until we are all gathered to his bosom. The Roman wall, the arch at Trier, the inscription on the Iron Gates of the Danube, the temples at Baalbek and Timgad, the aqueduct at Segovia, are adequate representatives of the militarism, sanitation and civic creed of Rome. Together these three influences built up the background for the Christian revelation; the basilica of St Peter is reared upon these mighty foundations and transcends them. Europe, as we understand it, is the work of the Catholic Church, and we can ask ourselves today . . . where, then, is the abiding memorial of the greatest of the Church’s intellects, St Thomas Aquinas? Where is the temple of the Solomon of the West?

As the eye looks eastward from the cliffs of Dover to embrace the territory of Europe, it picks out certain well-defined characteristics. The first is the appropriateness of the Roman boundaries, the Rhine and the Danube, with a possible extension to the Carpathians. Beyond these rivers and mountains stretch the vast plains which run into Asia, where Confucius and Mahomet and the Buddha rule instead of Abraham, Socrates and Justinian.

Bertrand Russell stated the fundamental problem of polities succinctly and in practical form at the beginning of his Reith Lectures with the question: ‘How can we combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress with the degree of social cohesion that is necessary for survival?’ It may be that the distinction that he makes is too clear cut and that there are circumstances where individual initiative is not anarchic or where the particular form of social cohesion imposed carries in itself the seeds of nihilism. Nonetheless, one cannot but agree with Russell when he suggests that the three primary aims of government are security, justice and conservation.

A far too simpliste approach to world polities, of which Russell himself is to some degree guilty, would equate the system in which individual initiative predominates with ‘the American way of life', and the system where social cohesion is created and maintained by unparalleled means of force with the U.S.S.B., and indeed with most of the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. The latter system, almost ex hypothesi, is stable with the monolithic rigidity of fanatical adherence to a doctrine, a messianic doctrine, that must be made to work out in practice. On the other hand, the American system is constantly undergoing changes which bring it nearer to being a balance between the two extremes. (It must not be thought that I am concerned to defend the American way of life—I would merely point out that it is constantly undergoing modifications, and cannot be reckoned static as is the doctrinaire Stalinist position.)

The discussion between Father Aelred Graham and Mr Douglas Woodruff—with Father John Fitzsimons intervening—seems to me to be typical of the sort of controversy that arises in almost any Catholic gathering of today when the subject of politics is introduced, though to be sure it is on a much higher dialectical plane than most. There is a great temptation to join in and develop the many fascinating but well-worn themes that have been raised in ever-widening circles round the original splash; but it would be unprofitable, if only because it has been done so often and much better before. What I am going to attempt is something much more presumptuous, that is to break out of the circle, which however wide is still a constriction of both Catholic thought and action.

First, may I offer a definition of politics? It is, I suggest, the art of the organisation of society for the common good. And the problem that does, or should, face the politician is how to preserve the liberty of the individual while securing the common good of all.

It is surely clear that the successful organisation of society for the common good must depend on the members of this or that society having a fairly unanimous idea of what is the common good for which they strive, and on their living and carrying out this organisation within a common structure or framework as to the essentials of which they are all more or less agreed. As Christopher Hollis has said, quoting and supporting Cecil Chesterton, ‘party government is only tolerable when the two parties agree in their political opinions’. Furthermore, as Fr Graham rightly enjoins, they must ‘see things steadily and see them whole’.

However we define genius, power and originality are inseparable from it. A genius often has more faults than the merely talented or competent. But power of thought and expression, and originality (not to be confused with novelty which can be manufactured) are always there. Now in Shaw’s words ‘Chesterton was a man of colossal genius’. Though he had many faults, in power and originality few writers have surpassed him. In some cases genius grows slowly: in others it develops suddenly late in life: in a few cases, such as Mozart, Keats, and Dickens, it emerges at once. Chesterton’s genius, his thought and style, was born complete in his earliest work. It matured; but there was no great increase of power, and the originality of style was there from the start. Perhaps the upheaval that took place in late adolescence, when he entered a period of doubt and depression and emerged triumphant, was the flame that fired the train of his genius; for his work was intimately bound up with his character—unlike so many men of genius whose characters are in pitiable contrast to their work, Chesterton’s mind and work were all of a piece.

The humility and charity and love of life that distinguished him, and impressed all who met him, were integrally one with his work. His humility, his sense of thankfulness for all creation, gave him a clarity of vision that can exist only when the ego is reduced to the fine point needed for sharp focus.

Diabolical possession is the devil’s hideous parody of the union between Christ and the soul in the spiritual marriage. Whereas the marriage of Christ with the soul is the consummation and seal of a union by grace long adorned with the constant display of acts of heroic virtue, the diabolical counterfeit is achieved usually after the subject’s long-continued and progressive indulgence in vice. The comparison is introduced only to indicate the nature of possession. Nor is it exact, for whereas Christ can possess only the souls of the good, it would seem that diabolical possession can sometimes occur when there is no deep-rooted habit of sin, and even in persons noted for holiness of life.

It is possible, however, that many records of supposed diabolical possession have not distinguished properly between ‘possession’ and ‘obsession’. In possession proper the grasp of the devil acts as a directive force; he can influence conduct. Nevertheless, the connection between man and his diabolical control is not strictly as between slave and master; it is more a partnership, in which the devil has the controlling interest. The man does not cease to be a man, nor to behave as a man. People may rave and blaspheme under diabolic influence; but they may also behave quite ‘properly’. They act always the part that suits the enemy of souls for the time being.

Obsession, on the other hand, is an incomplete and less disastrous form of diabolical influence. It operates chiefly through the imagination, and its effect is to worry or torture the mind, with less direct compelling force than in the possessed soul.

That Catholic social teaching has made but little impact on the public life of this country is a fact too well known to require emphasis here. We are now well accustomed to hear public speakers bewail Catholic apathy from cur platforms. Apathy is, however, but a partial explanation of the failure of the Church’s social teaching to make a deep impression even upon British Catholics and it is urgent that, instead of continuously bewailing this state of affairs, our writers and lecturers should make diligent inquiry as to the causes.

In so far as making an endeavour to shape the future social order of this country is concerned, it is, of course, quite true to assert that Catholics, as a whole, have shown little but indifference. But it is also true that this indifference is by no means confined to Catholics. Communist infiltration in Great Britain and, indeed, throughout the world (save where Communism has been imposed by armed force) has been made possible only by the neglect of the ordinary man to carry out his duty as a citizen in a democratic state.

This widespread indifference lies not so much in lack of interest (for the ordinary man of reasonable intelligence is keenly interested in discussion of at least those social problems which he thinks he can easily grasp) as in lack of energy—energy to acquire the necessary knowledge, energy to think out conclusions and energy to enter public life and act upon such conclusions. This lack of intellectual energy is, I think, a product of our industrial system, which, in the interests of increased production, has removed all pleasure from work, often leaving undiluted drudgery.

The Royal Commission on Population was appointed in 1944 to investigate the significance of demographic trends in Great Britain which during the 1930 s had caused widespread anxiety. Although the population figures had continued to grow between the two world wars at the rate of about 180,000 per year it was suspected that the birth-rate had fallen below replacement level even to the extent of ‘a substantial margin’ (p. 60).

The main factors influencing the natural increase (excess of births over deaths) of a population are the death-rate and birth-rate. The vast majority of births are to married women and therefore this factor is dependent almost entirely upon the number of marriages and the size of the family. The causes of the changes in the demographic trends in this country over the past seventy years may therefore be sought in four main contributory factors: migration, mortality, marriage and the size of the family.

The people of the country we call Rumania are in part descended from the ‘veterans of Trajan’, colonists drawn from several parts of the Roman empire, chiefly Italy and Illyricum, and planted in the province of Dacia in the early years of the second century A.D. They fused with the Thracian natives, and during the great migrations were overrun by Goths, Huns, Avars and other barbarians; the new people thus produced retained a language Latin in origin but modified by Slavonic and other influences—the name ‘Romania’ explains itself.

St Niketas of Remesiana (d.c. 414), to whom the composition of the Te Deum is attributed, is claimed as one of the apostles of the Dacians, and they certainly at first formed part of the Western church. But they were conquered by the Bulgars in the ninth century, passed to the Eastern church, and so were eventually involved in the Byzantine schism during the later middle ages. For a long time the Rumanians (or Vlachs) depended on hierarchs of the Bulgarian and other churches, and it was not till the fourteenth century that three separate metropolitans were given to the Rumanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia by the patriarch of Constantinople; there were some Catholics of Làtin rite and earlier in the middle ages bishops were appointed to look after these Kuman converts and Magyar, German and Polish colonists. The Moldavian metropolitan, Damian, signed the act of union at the Council of Florence in 1439, but his church refused to support him.

The Church in the early days of 1945 was no longer the same as the Church of 1932, and we shall pay heavily for any failure on our part to recognise the importance of this fact. On the one hand the Church has suffered the loss of almost everything that is normally associated with the Faith as it is practised in the family and in the parish; its scaffolding and its organisations have almost all been destroyed. Nor can the Church in Germany be entirely exonerated from the accusation of having failed over long periods of recent history to provide the nation with spiritual leadership and from its guilt on this account. But there is another side to the picture. New life has been poured into the Church by the blood of its martyrs, it has been purified by a flow of superhuman suffering, and it has undergone an interior rejuvenation. A generous missionary spirit is animating many of its members who have rediscovered the meaning and the richness of the Christian community; it can claim a trained, if small, elite, joyously prepared for sacrifices, who have it in them to serve as leaven for the masses.

At the same time as the Third Reich was brought low, the philosophy which had inspired that Reich, its ersatz religion, also came to an end. Millions of people were ready to entrust whatever hope and faith they had left to the Church because it had proved itself wiser, mightier and more enduring than their idol, the State. Yet there should be no illusions about the nature of this return to Christianity.

The economic crisis with which Britain is faced today has very little to do either with Tory Misrule before the war or with Socialist Mismanagement since. It is to some extent due to the loss of most of our overseas investments during the war; but it is mainly due to the fact that we are finding it more and more difficult to export our manufactures in exchange for food and raw materials. More than a hundred years ago Disraeli declared that ‘the continent will not suffer England to become the workshop of the world’, and he was right in spite of the fact that during the latter part of the nineteenth century we grew wealthy by exporting our manufactures in exchange for cheap food. The situation today is very different. The rest of the world is becoming more and more industrialised and the world is short of food. The ruthless exploitation of virgin forests and farmlands has resulted in erosion in five continents so that yields are going down and land is passing out of cultivation. At the same time populations are increasing and there is somewhat greater equality of income so that the effective demand for food is increasing. The result is that the terms of trade are moving against us. We are having and shall have to pay more in manufactures for what food we cannot produce at home and for the raw materials we need to keep our factories going.

A Writer in the Times Literary Supplement (29 January, 1949) devoted the whole middle page to a study of Hilaire Belloc, and gave sufficient praise to his prose but seemed to think his historical writing of little importance. The writer is generous in his appreciation of Mr Belloc as a man and of much that he stood for: ‘It was an old joke against Mr Belloc that he not only spoke for Europe but he wrote as if he was Europe. Where is the joke now? The Europe he spoke for is shrinking fast, as he warned us. We may still reject his remedies: but Catholics and Protestants both now contemplate with dismay the threat to displace the icons of the Faith for the icons of the Kremlin, the Bible for Das Kapital.’ That is finely said and is worth repeating. He concedes that Mr Belloc had ideas, whether we think them right or wrong, and ‘Ideas are rare and become rarer, especially when they are based on experience, on a strong sense of fact’. That, too, is generously said, and is true. The writing of so many modern historians suggests nothing so much as the regurgitation of sawdust. But, the writer seems to think that Belloc’s History of England, his books on Wolsey, Cranmer and Cromwell are of little account: ‘ (they) have all the thrill that vigour of presentation can give to conviction. Still, they throw more light on their author than on the subject.’ (It is odd that the writer nowhere mentions Belloc’s French Revolution studies).

When a man dies we reflect that he might have lived otherwise and attained to a Times obituary. W. W. Coupe, one of the more reverent of outcasts, would not have been more than mildly amused by a tribute to his spirit in the columns of The Times. But his death should not pass entirely unnoticed. In these days of ‘self-expression’ and gross over-publication we fail to realise just how many unpublished and unpublicised near-geniuses may live and die under the noses of the eminent and accepted arbiters of culture.

Coupe’s work was thinking. He was, in his way, a fine scholar and an interesting philosopher, yet when he died a short while ago only a handful of people knew of his work and were therefore able to recognise the extraordinary brilliance of his analysis. There are many reasons for this, the main one: Coupe. He had no talent for self-advertisement and made little effort at publication. Perhaps he would have enjoyed fame and notoriety, and gained a little happiness from academic distinction, for he was, I imagine, a reckless and ambitious fellow in his youth, and retained to the end an acute sense of humour. But he was by nature observer, analyst, commentator, even perhaps a bird of prey. He did not seek praise, he sought the response of understanding and exchanged ideas. He cared little for the mass, whether of scholars or of newspaper-readers, though he cared always, as every religious man must, for the innocent.

A well-known picture by Fra Angelico shows the meeting at Rome, in the year 1216, of St Francis and St Dominic. They were men of very different experience and temperament; yet they were one in heart; and between them they gave to Christianity a new form of apostolic ministry that still, over 700 years later, is operative in the world. Francis and Dominic were the founders of the friars. And a friar—the word simply means ‘brother’—a friar is one who combines elements of the earlier monasticism—its dedicatory vows, its communal life, its daily round of praise of God in church—with the manifold works of the pastoral ministry. For the friar, contemplation of divine things issues in activity outside his monastery: he is, as it were, both monk and missioner—‘revivalist’, if you like . . . Dominic was a Spaniard by birth; and in the south of France in the early years of the thirteenth century he was faced with the ravages of a doctrine that was both false in the abstract and vicious and anti-social in practice. Moved by intense compassion for those who erred in ignorance, he saw that what was wanted was intelligent presentation of the truths of Christian faith by men who lived really in accordance with those truths—a real ministry of the word and of example. And so he brought into being the Order of Preachers or Black Friars.