The ‘muddled marriage’ is only one among a great number of cases needing very special pastoral sympathy and care and guidance, in these days especially. The grim fact has to be faced that problems connected with the sexual life, often caused by a clash between the individual Catholic’s instinct or indeed conviction on the one hand and the Church’s teaching as it is so often presented or understood on the other, are responsible not only for great unhappiness in the lives of innumerable Catholics, but also for the fact that an appalling number are led, by their inability to ‘conform’, to leave the Church altogether. The equally grim fact has also to be faced that within the Church the growing conviction among lay people that the clergy either cannot or will not understand or sympathise with their very real difficulties is leading to a wider and wider cleavage between the two.

The case of preventive birth-control is a notorious example. There are married people who for one reason or another just cannot, at least temporarily, have more children: what an insult to tell them, sans façons, that in that case they must just ‘abstain from indulgence in sexual intercourse’. (Ecclesiastical jargon often indicates a lack of real theological thinking.) The whole point is that this is not a question of ‘indulgence’: it is of the very essence of their married, their Catholic married, life. From the layman’s point of view what too often happens is that first they are told how wonderfully God has blessed the mystery of human love and sex and marriage, and then in the next breath they are told to go off and do without it.

Can there ever be such a thing as having a vocation to choose the wrong vocation? A man adopts a career only to discover too late that it is the wrong career; marries a woman only to find too late that she is the wrong woman; settles down into a fixed, narrow groove only to find that at heart he is a wanderer. Perhaps we should see these errors of judgment as being no more than permitted by God; what is certain is that, the false situation once established, the frustration set up, the sufferer must surely see his vocation as being not at an end but at a beginning: something of value has to be made somehow out of the muddle.

There are of course many other types of frustration, and they are tragically common. There is the outwardly successful marriage which in reality has become empty of meaning: the husband and wife continuing—for the sake of appearances, or from a sense of duty, or because of the children— to act as a happy couple while in reality there is no longer any real communion between them or any hope of any. There are the men and women who long for married life but never achieve it. There are those who have a deep desire to become this or that, to achieve this or that, but have in the end to admit that they lack the necessary gifts. There are those who long for friends, for companionship, but are condemned to loneliness; there are those who never seem to be able to make a real success of anything to which they put their hands. In the moral sphere there are those who long to make something worthy of their lives but who feel hopelessly defeated by some vice which they lack the strength to conquer; there are the cases of undeveloped conscience or deep character defect where a vague desire to ‘be good’ is at times of emotional exaltation raised to grandiose heights of resolution only to be dashed again into the depths of despair when the next defeat occurs.

‘Conscience’ is a word of which we ought to be I proud. It proclaims that the criterion of good and evil lies within the individual man. Whatever orders he may be called upon to obey, in the last resort a man relies on the interior judgment which says ‘Yes, I ought to act in this way’, or ‘No, it would be sinful to do that.’ Through his conscience, a man is finally accountable to himself alone; or rather, he is freed from that merely human authority under which so many people find themselves.

It was the moralists such as Cic'ero and Seneca who first gave conscience a prominent place, at least in so far as the examination of past actions is concerned. St Paul, who introduced the notion into the Christian tradition, extended it to the control of future actions as well. Here it has no easy part to play, and gives rise to many problems. The scholastic theologians who discussed the extent to which its judgments should be followed, held that it may sometimes be mistaken, for it may consider that something is good which in reality is evil, and vice versa. But it was St Thomas above all who insisted on the authority of conscience, declaring that its ruling must be followed even if it is mistaken, though he added that a man who acts in this way is not necessarily free from blame. The man must obey his erroneous conscience, but in doing so he sins if he could have corrected it; the only solution for him is to alter his conscience by bringing it into agreement with the truth.

The importance given to conscience in St Thomas’s teaching is perhaps most clearly seen in his examination of the conflict that may occur between a subject and his superior.

Ownership has both personal and social aspects. One of the main justifications of personal property is that it is an essential material guarantee of a reasonable freedom and is an incentive to productive work. This is commonly called the profit-motive. Certainly what the ordinary man really wants is a fair distribution of private property and not its abolition. And it is his reasonable hope that he may be allowed to enjoy his property in his declining years and hand it on to his posterity.

The right to full ownership really includes two rights: the right of use and the right of disposal. I may use what I own, and others, without my permission, may not use it. I may sell, lend or give what I own, and so transfer to another my own right of exclusive use.

The proprietor or owner is the one who enjoys the full right to dispose of what is his in so far as it is not prohibited by law or harmful to others. It implies a claim to possess something as one’s own, as a due, and therefore imposes constraint (whether by way of forbearance, acquiescence, or active support) on the rest of the world. Thus if a man has a right to a sum of money, this means that someone has also the duty of paying it to him. The thing or object of this right of disposal is property, and the right of disposal itself is ownership. The same principles apply when property is held jointly by a public body or corporation, or by a trust.

Following the conceptions of Roman Law, Blackstone (Comm. I, 138) states that the right of property consists in the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land. Ownership bestows on a person the right to dispose of a thing for his private interests as he sees fit.

The editor asked me to write something about how Blackfriars came into being. It was over thirty-three years ago and I am now six thousand miles away. So at this distance in time and place my task has its difficulties. I have little more than my memory to rely upon, and I feel like old Kaspar in Southey’s poem sitting in the sun indulging in reminiscences, perhaps as remote to many people as the Battle of Blenheim must have seemed to little Wilhelmine and her brother Peterkin.

It was Father Bede Jarrett who decided to start the review and it must have been among the many schemes that filled his thoughts when he became Provincial at the end of the year 1916. The idea of such a review was by no means new. The Hawkesyard Review, which had been in existence for about twenty years, was an occasional review edited by the students at Hawkesyard and a kind of depository for their written efforts, literary, philosophical and theological. It began as a collection of manuscripts later it appeared in typescript and finally blossomed out in the full glory of print three times a year. During Father Vincent McNabb’s priorship the students were actually printing it themselves on a hand press, and printing it well enough to win the praise of experts. The Review provided a training ground for aspiring writers whose contributions naturally varied in style and quality: it was just a family affair and strictly for private circulation only. There was another collection of manuscripts of a different kind, produced annually by the Hawkesyard students, called The Mince Pie.

It would be interesting to know in what sense the Archbishop of Canterbury used the word ‘propaganda’ in introducing to the public, in his speech to Convocation, the pamphlet Infallible Fallacies as a useful antidote to the ‘intensified propaganda’ of the Catholic Church. This word has almost lost its primary and original sense, and has acquired a loaded and sinister meaning. What it usually signifies today is spreading or bolstering up an idea by suppressing half the truth about it, using false emphasis, suggestion and even direct mis-statement, and especially by employing a technique of making isolated and probably hypothetical instances appear as widely applicable generalisations. Inevitably, when the word is used, it raises in the mind an imaginative picture embodying these associations. It is strange then that His Grace should have used it, without explanation, when speaking officially on the delicate topic of the greatest Church in Christendom and the methods it uses in proclaiming its teaching, and it is still stranger that he should have selected for commendation, as a defence against this teaching, a pamphlet which exhibits, though clearly unconsciously and in ignorance, many of the characteristics of propaganda in this secondary and less reputable sense.

The excitement with which the conferring of the Red Hat on Cardinal Gracias was greeted in Bombay had a special quality. It was not just that it came to the first Indian Cardinal; it was rather like the enthusiasm of Preston or Bolton on receiving the Cup. The Cup, clearly, is won. So in a real sense was the Hat, and that is the difference between East and West.

There had been no attempt to disguise the disappointment felt when about a month earlier all twenty-four hats had gone to the West. Indian Catholics had seen overwhelming reason to hope for at least one more Asian Cardinal in the seventy; in general what the Westerner says about the decision of a superior, the best Eastern Christian likes to say to a superior; in that he is already much nearer to apostolic Christianity. But if there was an Indian Archbishop in Bombay at all to receive the Hat, that was a situation which had been earned also. This is not the place to dilate on the subject. Immense as the joy in India has been in the first Indian Cardinal, I think that there may be more joy in Heaven on what the East can give back to the West.

One of the pastoral problems which loom very large in these days is that of the Catholics who, having entered upon a marriage which the Church cannot recognise as such, then find themselves tortured in mind by their consequent separation from the sacramental life of the Church, and long to return to it but see no way of doing so. What is to be done for them? How are they to be advised?

It is as useless as it is heartless to say simply that they have only themselves to blame: that they sinned in contracting a marriage which is no marriage at all, and that the Church will receive them back when, and only when, they renounce it. In practice this is harmful, since it may well drive them completely and finally away from the Church. In theory it is bad theology, because it simplifies what is in reality complex, and refuses to face all the facts of a human situation. Ethics is not an exact science, precisely because its business is with the complexities and untidiness of human action in the concrete; and indeed the ultimate ethical judgment, as to what A is to do here and now, is not a question of science merely but of art, the art of prudence. We might well recall here some wise words of M. Maritain: ‘Some people imagine that morality measures our actions, not in the light of the just human ends which they ought to be aiming at in the given circumstances, but by a forest of abstract formulae which life must copy like a book. ... In reality the principles of morals are not theorems or idols: they are the supreme rules governing a concrete activity the aim of which is something to be done in certain definite circumstances, and governing it through more proximate rules and above all through the rules, which are never set down in advance, of the virtue of prudence. . . . They do not seek to devour human life; they are there to build it up.

Early European travellers among savage peoples generally related that they had little or no religion. Anthropological writers often give the impression that they have little else. This contrast is, of course, to some extent accounted for by the great increase in knowledge about these peoples, but it is also due to a wider definition in modern times of what may be regarded as a religious fact. If the early traveller found among a people nothing corresponding to what he himself had been brought up to regard as religion he was prone to report that they had no religion, only some superstitions. As, however, the definition of religion was extended by anthropologists to cover ancestor cults, totemic observances, fetishism, and even magic and witchcraft, the part played by religious conceptions in the simpler societies received greater emphasis. The widening of the definition would seem to be due in part to changes in our own intellectual atmosphere. The early explorers were Christians. The early anthropologists were not. For the explorers had religion and the savage had not. But the positivism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, associated in most people’s minds with the name of Comte, had had so strong an influence that the positions tended to become reversed in anthropological theories from the middle of last century till well into the present one. Since it was then held that religion is a way of thinking characteristic of the earliest phase of human development, savages had to be portrayed as totally lost in its darkness. Sir James Frazer, speaking of primitive religion, asserted that ‘the life of the savage is saturated with it’. Lévy-Bruhl declared that ‘the reality in which primitive peoples move is itself mystical’.

No age in Christian history has gone without the grievous accompaniment of martyrdom. We are not singular in this affliction. And so it seems vain upon its occasion merely to protest as if at some monstrous political anomaly. Should we not rather suspect and seek to uncover the profounder connection between it and the economy of our redemption which was effected upon the Cross?

In this enquiry a natural starting point is afforded by St John’s vision of the Apocalypse. He wrote the record of that vision about the year 96 A.D., when the Emperor Domitian’s systematic oppression of the Christians impended. They were a prey to the deepest discouragement. They had already undergone the capricious cruelty of Nero’s persecution. Was there to be no end to their suffering? They must call Domitian, now, Lord and God; this would be the test of their civic loyalty, and it would be a loyalty enforced at the point of the sword. Less and less did it seem possible for the elect to live at peace with the world. St John’s vision brought them the answer. He saw all time stretched over age upon age of persecution and struggle; but he saw simultaneously the same ages gathered in a single syllable of time, made over to victory in the blood of the Lamb. Through the ages Satan, the great dragon—cast down to earth where alone his power remains unloosed—persecuted the Woman whose children are the brethren of Christ. Deprived of power against her and her Firstborn, he ‘went to make war on the rest of her children, the men who keep God’s commandments, and hold fast to the truth concerning Jesus’. ‘Day and night he stood, accusing them in God’s presence. But because of the Lamb’s blood, and because of the truth to which they bore witness, they triumphed over him, holding their lives cheap till death overtook them.’