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.’

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’.

We are bound to obey the legitimate orders of our legitimate superiors in any society we claim to be part of.

The defendants at Nuremberg admitted themselves to be members of the Nazi State; both the defendants and the prosecutors admitted that Nazi Germany was a state in the international sense of that term, and in that state orders could be legitimately conveyed down the appropriate chain of military or civil command.

Because authority was legitimately vested in the state, it could be presumed to be properly exercised by those tn whom commands were addressed. This presumption was not irrebuttable to the ordinary European mind; but the Nazis strove to make it irrebuttable. The Nazis sought to make the state the sole society to which a Nazi could belong, and to make the head of that state the sole source of legal and moral obligation; this monolithic conception, intended to be the strength of the Nazi state, in fact became its greatest weakness. When the Fuhrer destroyed himself, he also carried the Nazi state to destruction: as he intended.

A strong society is one which allows the free growth of legitimate aspirations expressed in different forms of societies and corporations. The closed, or totalitarian, form of society looks strong from outside, it looks neat and streamlined, but internally its life tends to be cramped and to lack spontaneity when not kept young by regular blood transfusions from those who direct it and who themselves remain relatively free.

It is fashionable nowadays for some critics of the Church to compare the Church with a totalitarian state. Clearly there are resemblances between any well-organised hierarchical societies when viewed from outside: but such a comparison overlooks the essential difference in spirit between the Church and the secular state.

All Christendom, Catholic and Protestant, believes that God has spoken to men, and that his Word thus spoken is the Word of Life, the good news of salvation. All Christendom too, though not without reservations, believes that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain that Word written. Beyond this Christians begin to part company along a hundred different roads. The cause of their divergence is the variety of different answers given to the question how God’s Word written is to be understood. Is it self-authenticating j does it yield its meaning to each man’s conscience by the inner light of the Spirit, or are we to approach it by the aid of sound learning, relying only, for the conviction of faith, on the ordinary means of knowledge with which reason has endowed us? What part does the concept of the Church play in mediating God’s message to men’s minds, in terms which they can depend upon with certainty? Does God, in his written Word, stand in judgment over and reform the verdicts of the Church, or does Christ our Lord, living in it by the power of the Holy Spirit, guide its understanding of the written word and himself speak with its voice? If the Church is integrally necessary to the proclamation of the gospel, what is its nature and how can its voice be recognised and its verdicts guaranteed? The fundamental disunities of Christendom lie in the answers given to these questions. To the finding of a way which will lead from such diversity into a unity willed by God the world-wide ecumenical movement has addressed itself for over thirty years with a sincerity and depth of desire which must surely be the work of the Holy Spirit.

Foggia must be one of the dustiest, most unattractive towns in Italy; a settlement or conglomeration of utilities dumped at one end of the great drained plain where the only cheerful sights are the trim council villas of a Fascist period housing scheme, standing each in its decent stretch of ground. Occasionally a model village can also be seen bravely starting up round a brand-new modern church.

Driving on beyond Foggia, up into the Gargano peninsula, the mountain landscape grows ever bleaker in the colourlessness of cactus, dust, stone and lime. Above, on the ridge where lie Padre Pio’s great white hospital and smaller Capuchin monastery, the mountains stretch more forbidding still.

San Giovanni Rotondo, when at last we reached it, might have been any township in a Western film, with sand and stone and dust massed into larger lumps to form human dwellings. This must be the very back of beyond, the uttermost edge of the world. Nobody surely would come here except as a fugitive—from justice, from fellow-man, from the world. For here is no single redeeming feature, no single attraction except Padre Pio, the stigmatic Friar at the little Capuchin monastery at the top of the village.

To this unprepossessing place flock visitors from all over Italy and beyond. During my week at San Giovanni Rotondo I met Americans, Britons, Latin-Americans, Swiss, French and others, but mostly Italians. Not just ‘superstitious peasants’, but Italians of every class and degree. They are all there—one soon feels—for the same reason.

The following article is concerned with discovering a basis for a more mature spiritual life, especially in the case of men. Three different viewpoints are successively adopted, from each of which man’s development is traced from childhood, through adolescence to complete maturity; at each stage far-reaching changes are seen to take place, and about the age of forty to forty-five a crisis normally occurs, which we shall have to discuss in some detail.

A child is utterly self-centred, though his charm and simplicity prevent this from shocking us as it would in a grown-up. In his actions he always aims at getting his own way, which to a large extent means satisfying his physical needs.

As he grows into a youth he enters into fuller possession of his mental and physical powers. He is haunted by the spirit of adventure and by vague ambitions (ambition itself, less generous, comes only later), for there seems no limit to what he is able to do. But for all his openness of heart he remains somewhat self-centred; it is the things that will allow him to live his own life, with his own personality, that he is striving after.

The coronation service is not a picturesque anachronism, of purely secular interest. It is an historical drama of great antiquity. The central feature is the hallowing of the Queen effected by the anointing, as expressive of her own self-dedication to the service of God and of her people. At the crowning of the Emperor the whole ritual was called ordo ad benedicendum imperatorem, quando coronatur. Regal coronation therefore takes the form of a blessing imparted with great solemnity, with the Mass as its natural setting and culminating point. In origin it is a sacramental conjoined to a sacrament.

The Queen herself, in her broadcast last Christmas, asked for the prayers of her people, no matter what religion they belonged to, that she might be blessed by God, and be made faithful to the promises she would make before the altar of Westminster Abbey on the day of her coronation. Catholics will not be slow in responding to the deeply religious appeal publicly made by her Majesty.

In remote times the crowning and investiture of the Emperor was without religious character. When Leo II was crowned (473) we find the Patriarch reciting a prayer, and at length it became the duty of the Patriarch of Constantinople to set the diadem on the head of the Emperor. With the crowning in church of Phocas (602), the ceremonial assumed a formal and religious character.

One day when the blessed Peter was making his way through the country about Milan he happened on two men sowing their fields, of whom one was a Catholic, the other a heretic. The Catholic before beginning his work called on God to help him, but the heretic invoked the devil, whom as the maker of the visible world he believed to have the government of the earth and its crops; and when they heard one another each condemned the other for the perversity of his faith. The blessed Peter who by the will of God was passing that way drew near. . . .’ The outcome is hardly in doubt: St Peter prophesied, and when in time the field of the Catholic bore a plentiful crop and the heretic’s none, the heretic was convinced by the miracle and became a Catholic. But St Peter was not always as confident as on that occasion. Another day he met a heretic who challenged him to a disputation. St Peter, unprepared, was momentarily overwhelmed by his subtleties and went into a church to pray; even there, before the Lady altar, he was visited by doubt and trepidation, and it required the voice of the Blessed Virgin herself to reassure him.

The contrast between Savonarola and his times was not as vivid as had been imagined. Much of what he stood for was but the logical corollary to many of the aspirations of Renaissance men, a fact which explains in more than one way the success he enjoyed in the Florence of the Medici. Such a success in that town is even more remarkable when one realises that Savonarola was not a Florentine by birth. This must be pointed out, since the inhabitants of Florence looked down upon the other Italians as inferior beings, who behaved boorishly and spoke in absurdly ridiculous dialects. He came instead from Ferrara in north Italy. Now during the fifteenth century Ferrara was in more than one way the capital of the north Italian Renaissance. Yet Savonarola’s home atmosphere was by no means that of Cossa’s dazzling frescoes in the Schifanoia palace. What instead dominated it was the rigid puritanism of his grandfather, the court physician Michele Savonarola, a narrow scholar still intellectually in the middle ages. Michele saw to his grandson’s upbringing, and from him the young Savonarola acquired a remarkable taste for Holy Scripture. Still the attraction of Petrarch’s love lyric did not by-pass him altogether.

The little story that follows has something in common with Guareschi’s Don Camillo tales, but it has the advantage of being true; and truth is more interesting than fiction even when the latter is written by a humorist of genius. My true story is not funny, but most Italian priests who know communism at close quarters do not—sometimes for different reasons—find the situation at all funny, and are even inclined to blame Guareschi for having, as one of them said to me, ‘joked about things that are tragic’. That may not be quite fair to Guareschi, but it is a point of view which his non-Italian admirers should not overlook.

As for my story, its setting is the Tuscan countryside today, where three-quarters of the population are communist and therefore officially excommunicated by the Church. That is the first point to grasp. Try to imagine the more obvious difficulties confronting a priest in this situation. Is he to refuse the Sacraments to everyone who has the party membership card and will not throw it away? If so, he knows that he is shutting the church door in the face of most of the men in his parish and more than half the women. Over large zones of central Italy the peasants just assume, as a thing too obvious to need discussion, that the communist party is their party. E il nostro partito: the phrase comes out pat as a matter of course. Moreover it is widely assumed in Italy (at least verbally) that communism is simply Christianity in practice, and that the priests at the bottom of their hearts know this. In other words it is assumed that the barrier between Church and communism is no more than a legal device erected by the priests because their self-interest ties them to the other political faction.

In a previous Blackfriars article the development of the attitude of the Holy See to the Ecumenical Movement, during thirty years, was traced in outline. This development has followed marked changes in the nature and aims of the movement itself, and these have enabled the Holy See, while still remaining aloof from ecumenical organisation, to encourage the Catholic episcopate in fostering its own ‘reunion’ work on ecumenical lines, in close touch with the movement. The principles of a Catholic ecumenism, with necessary safeguards against the dangers to be met with in their application, are embodied in the Instruction to local ordinaries on the Ecumenical Movement, issued in December 1949 by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. This document is a charter and guide for Catholics in the work of promoting the unity of Christendom among our own countrymen.

The purpose of the present article is to discuss, tentatively and by way of suggestion, the lines of action by which Catholic ecumenical work could be applied to the religious situation in England today. Between Catholics and their non-Catholic countrymen who are professing Christians, there lies a formidable psychological barrier; a barrier which keeps in being distorted ideas of the doctrines that divide Christendom, and hinders the realisation by non-Catholics of the direction in which true Christian unity lies. The aim of Catholic ecumenism is to work, from our side, for the removal of this psychological barrier by the same methods and in the same spirit with which the non-Catholic ecumenists are working from theirs. The non-Catholic ecumenist may object that this is not, and cannot be, true ecumenical work, but is rather the proselytising spirit of Catholicism in borrowed clothes. True ecumenism, he would say, renounces convert-making and aims only at promoting corporate growth towards truth, in each separate tradition, until the day when all achieve a common unity in Christ.

Fruitful discussion between persons who accept different philosophic systems postulates a point of contact, an area of agreement in terms of which one system can translate the terms of another system. This is so because any highly developed system has its own terminology.

So far as Marxism goes, we are like the spectators of a strange and complicated game, whose players speak a foreign language. For the Marxist philosophy is not a contemplative activity, it is not a system in the sense that Hegelianism is a system; it is simply the deduction of positive knowledge from the world through our minds. Any philosophic statement is simply the best approximate account of a given situation which is valid relative to this or that point in the historical process. The situation is constituted by matter and its laws translated into the human head. This is not an ‘insight into’, but a mirroring of, environmental conditionment.

The difficulty is that words like ‘peace’, ‘justice’, and so on, have the same sound for Marxists and ourselves but mean quite different things. For the Marxist there is no meaning about the word ‘justice’ save as it receives definition in relation to one or other stage in the historical process. Indeed, only statements formulated in terms of matter in motion can be true. Hence the philosophic opinions of others are interpreted by him in relation to their exponents’ social conditionment and only affect him as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’.

For Lenin, all ‘abstractions must be taken back into the concrete, for they are only true in so far as they reject the history of developing production’. He saw his philosophic task as that of a guardian of the Marx-Engels theory in its purity.

If the diffusion of his works and the range of his influence is to be taken as any guide, St Bernard was beyond question the most outstanding figure in the Europe of his day. Certainly among the schoolmen, no teacher ever had so many devoted disciples, no single preacher so fired the imagination of thousands, there was no one whose moral drive was so potent a fact in the lives of men of every degree. There were saints of the towns and saints of the country, saints of the court and the schoolroom: Bernard spoke to the world. Even to this day, when all allowance has been made for the misfortunes of time, of fire and casual destruction, a tangible witness to his power could be assembled in sackloads of manuscripts from the greater libraries, and those who have merely a nodding acquaintance with the available materials will know why Mabillon, that indefatigable scholar, doubted if any single individual were capable of coping with the task of collation. Available in print by 1475, although we still await anything like that critical edition which the great Maurist was content to leave for another generation, St Bernard’s works have never ceased to be re-edited and translated right up to 1953, the eighth centenary of his death. Among the many volumes and essays devoted to Bernard in the present year, the Rev. Bruno Scott James has given us an English translation of the letters and the familiar biography by Dr Watkin Williams has been reprinted.

History reveals to us few spectacles more awesome than the long procession of mortals who, undeterred by considering their mortal frailty, have set out to revise, re-edit, redecipher, retranslate the text of the sacred scriptures. Seventy-two Greek-speaking Jews locked up in a library, a hermit in a rocky wilderness, a whole monastery given over, year after year, to the collating of photostats: should the line stretch out to the crack of doom, we may be sure that the last newcomer will still believe that where his precursors have erred, he will find the right way, the just word. We may be sure, too, that his ‘Azymes’, his ‘Feast of the Skipover’, his ‘Give each other a hearty handshake all round for my sake’ will earn for him the unkind criticisms of those by whom, usually, he has not meant his version to be read at all. The translators, the emendators, the excisors, interpolators, forgers, the Urtexter-finder have all had their way with us, and yet we still contrive, century after century, to know more or less what the Bible is about; surely a most striking fulfilment of St Matthew xxiv, 35.

The late Father Hugh Pope, o.p., was attracted to the history of these undertakings as they have affected Britain and the United States; and in English Versions of the Bible (B. Herder, London, 1952; 75s.) we have a revision, first by an anonymous Benedictine and then by Father Sebastian Bullough, o.p., of the book which he had not completed at the time of his death in 1946. It is a vast work, beginning with Caedmon and bringing us down to 1950. It is questionable whether Fr Pope was well advised in seeking to compile such an exhaustive treatment of what is not one subject but three.

No one who studies savage societies would say, today, that there are modes of thought which are confined to primitive peoples. It is rather that we ourselves have specialised ways of apprehending reality. The contributors to this series may, indeed, have described notions which we do not easily take for granted, but which are commonplace among many peoples without our modern science and technology. But any historical sense of proportion—and our historical thought, our sense of relativities, is among our distinguishing characteristics—reminds us that it is some of our own habits of thought which are newly-formed and uncommon. We stand more or less alone, for example, in not taking witchcraft seriously, or distant kinship; and our indifference in such matters divides us equally from savages, and from those ancient cultures whose civilisation, in other respects, we are proud to inherit.

Further, since the eighteenth century at least, we have been rather disposed to forget that a satisfying representation of reality may be sought in more than one way, that reasoning is not the only way of thinking, that there is a place for meditative and imaginative thought.

From what a man is, springs all that he does. The being Hilaire Belloc, a person of very much larger than life size, a natural portent, vivid, roaring, and exciting as a thunderstorm, was present to me long before I knew anything about his work, even the Moral Alphabet and the Bad Child's Book of Beasts which were kept in the back drawing-room and later filled us with a fearful joy as intense as that inspired by their creator. He had always been there: a grown man who liked children, and who could be observed with delicious awe to behave very badly, according to the standards of Nanny. We did not then know he had created an entirely apocryphal legend that there hung in our quiet rationalist nursery a card bearing the words, illuminated like a text, ‘No Rot About God’; but we were acutely conscious that he did many other agreeably outrageous things. He shouted with laughter whenever he felt like it; he sometimes sang in the street as he walked along; he went into pubs; and once there was talk of his being tried in a court of justice for something he had put in a paper, talk which led me to visualise him as chained by the leg in a dark stone cell in the Tower of London, with a jailer looking in once a day to bring him a stale loaf and a jug (the large white enamelled sort used in bathrooms) of tap-water. This must have been at the time of the Marconi case libel action.

He had always been there; yet the natural self-centredness of childhood made him seem real only when he flashed through our humdrum ambience like a shooting star. To go to King’s Land where he lived under the downs was for the first time to perceive him as a giant with a house, a family, a way of living quite independent of our own, continuing when we were not there to see.

In every age, even in the centuries called Christian, believers have had to lament the infidelities of men. That is a grief which concerns, most of all, our own individual souls. But the lawyer and the statesman are concerned with institutions, and with the fact that these institutions have been Christian for centuries and have ceased to be so in our time. Christian lawyers and statesmen should feel a tremendous responsibility for this decline of Christian standards in their own generation. They cannot be consoled by the sort of sophistry which suggests that Christian institutions are impossible; that to talk about them only betrays an external view and an unspiritual outlook; that there may be more genuine Christianity in the souls of a few human beings in a so-called unchristian age than in all those celebrated centuries of Christian culture, and that it is only this true Christianity in some individual souls which really matters.

There is one institution, however, which is so closely connected with the very essence of human personality that nobody should venture to call it external; namely, matrimony. And there have been two fundamental changes in it during the last four or five centuries: one that dates back to the Reformation and one that is a specific development of our own time.

It has for long been a source of disquiet to the public conscience that Great Britain is among the very few western countries which find it necessary to retain the death penalty. This policy is only a continuance of a curious national tradition of ruthlessness about executions, for although England had always made a minimal use of torture, and was a pioneer in prison reform, she retained on her statute books until well into the nineteenth century more capital offences than any other civilised country. For Catholics, teaching on the morality of a death sentence is clear. As Mr Hollis points out in his admirable contribution to Messrs Paget and Silverman’s book, ‘It is certainly the teaching of the Christian religion that life is sacred, that it is God who gives life, and therefore only reasons of absolute necessity could justify the taking of life’. The Church has never condemned capital punishment as such; in practice it connived at or even demanded its use by the secular arm for heresy, sorcery, and other offences, and when the popes held temporal power it was in operation in the papal states. Catholics may, one concludes, support capital punishment if it is necessary. But is it necessary? Are there really circumstances in which the only right thing Christians can do with a fellow-citizen is to break his neck? That is the question which the Royal Commission, which recently reported, was appointed in 1949 to answer.

Any discussion on the economic aspects of Communism has to refer to Russian experience since Russia was the first (and for some time the only) example of the application of Marxist economic philosophy. And it is perhaps only poetic justice that Russia should have contradicted Marx in almost every aspect of his economic teaching. Russia according to Marxist doctrine should never have become Communist—at least not when it did—for it had not experienced the full development of capitalist society. Russia also found it necessary, contrary to Marxist tenets, to operate a normal pricing mechanism and to pay money wages, not according to need, but according to the type of output that the state wished to foster. In other words, the Soviet planners discovered that the acquisitive motive— and original sin—still existed in a Communist state.

But before the significance of this contradiction can be discussed, its existence must be proved. Marx did not study economic problems as an end in themselves but merely because in his day current political controversy had an economic content. To him economics was nothing more than a means of discovering the laws of social development. He argued that the social productive relationships entered into by man formed the anatomy of a society. They enabled a society not only to make the fullest use of its productive powers but also to increase them, and through this increase the productive powers were brought into conflict with the social relationships. In more concrete terms, Marx claimed that the basic contradiction in capitalism is the increasingly social co-operative nature of production, because the means of production are individually owned, and it shows itself in the development of two classes which are inevitably antagonistic since their interests are incompatible.