Since we are to try to lay a foundation for future discussion, the first essential seems to be that we shall know our own mind. And as catholics that means in the words of St. Paul: ‘to let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus’ (Phil, ii, 5). When we begin to appreciate what that means we can take our stance.

The world for us is explained in terms of reason and of faith-—two ways of knowing the truth, different in mode and complementary in what they give the mind. In common with every human being we can use our mind on the world as we discover it, and we do. Asking the how and why of things, sorting out the wealth of experience and facts and activity, trying tc discover some purpose in it all, to get a view of things as a whole and in their causes, and this is to philosophise. Sapientis est ordinare. Men have done this from the beginning with more or less sincerity, more or less success. Sometimes philosophers have succumbed to the temptation to pursue one aspect at the cost of the whole, sometimes philosophy has been prostituted by being made the handmaid of propaganda. So that at first glance the history of philosophy seems to present an overwhelming confusion of theories that contradict, an embarras de richesses. But a closer inspection does yield a developing body of thought, as indeed we can rightly expect, since the raw material of philosophy is God’s revelation of Himself in nature. This body of thought, the philosophia perennis, synthetised by Aristotle among the pagans, and Aquinas among the Christians— that is not to exclude others, but to name the morning stars—and enriched, sometimes unwittingly, by their successors, will provide us with principles when we begin to sort out the richness of knowledge and achievement, the bewilderment of chaos and confusion we find ourselves in to-day.

From Oxford Father Bede was sent to Louvain to finish off his Dominican training. He still had two years of his theological course to complete before he could exercise the full ministry of a priest and Friar Preacher. It might have been expected that his earlier ecclesiastical knowledge would have grown rusty during his three years absorption in secular studies and interests in Oxford, and that more than the normal two years would be required if he were to recover lost ground and complete his theological studies satisfactorily. Instead of that he crowded his remaining work into less than one year, and with such success that the examiners who at the end of that time awarded him his degree in theology spoke of him as the best prepared student they had ever examined. In every way Oxford made him, not a worse, but a better candidate for all ecclesiastical dignities and responsibilities.

This was the last of his examinations. He left them all behind him with a sigh of relief. Years later he could write to a young man still at the mercy of examiners:

‘I have only two bits of advice: one is never to work in the afternoon, a fatal mistake; the other is never to be angry with one’s paper. That is equally fatal. A prayer to the Holy Ghost is far simpler, more effectual, and quiets the nerves . . . Personally I hate all exams so desperately, whether or no I am ready for them, that I can’t understand anyone going near them who hasn’t got to. Since the year 1896 I have never failed in an exam, and have hated’ em all! ... Freedom is incompatible with swotting for an exam, and swotting must go on till the beastly things are all over.

In the world of to-day, and especially in a world at war, the Church stands apart. It has standards that do not change with circumstances, though their application may. And it has never thought that man is capable of standing alone, or expected him to provide perfection in this life, knowing quite well that however much you may alter the world, human nature will be much the same. So to-day it would seem that the Church may have, already has, a great opportunity and a great work to do. And one, moreover, that her officials, the priests and Bishops, cannot do alone. Pope Pius saw this when he developed Catholic Action, that emphasis on the part the laity can and must play in the mission of the Church to the world. It is clear from many passages in different Encyclicals that men and women have each their part in this mission, as it also is abundantly clear from a consideration of fact. What is the part of women? Our experience of war and its aftereffects in our own life-time bids us see even now another new world in the making. The apostolate of the laity will be of more urgency than before. Here we are concerned with certain fundamentals of that apostolate, and in particular with the role of the Catholic woman.

All through the history of the Church women have played a great part. Our Lady in the beginning had, and still holds, a most exalted position; among the innumerable women saints there have been very public and active ones like St. Catherine of Sienna, a dyer’s daughter who actively influenced Popes and Kings, and others whom the world has hardly heanl of till their death, like St. Teresa of Lisieux: women who have worked at home and pioneers who have gone all over the world.

Once,’ says Canon Dimnet, ‘I heard a shepherd saying that “the wind sat in France,”’ for the Canon was born in that frontier district of his country that was formerly part of the old Middle Kingdom of Lotharingia and later of the Duchy of Burgundy. Dimnet is a Frenchman born and bred; in My Old World he has created an unforgettable picture of the typical small town that was his birthplace, Trélon, with its gray spire dominating the flat landscape; but though the life of Trélon is French, its memories are of older allegiance, and the shepherd was recording in his phrase a time when, to the inhabitants of Trélon and all about Cambrai, the French were ‘foreigners.’

It is perhaps not too fanciful to see in this frontier background an explanation of Canon Dimnet’s extraordinary feeling for a language and a culture not his own. An uncle early taught him ‘simple English words; door, window, pen, book . . . and had given our dog quite a standing in the street by calling him, for some reason, Euston.’ The little flame lighted by his uncle grew during school days until at last, on going to teach at Douai, Ernest Dimnet came into contact with the English Benedictine community in that town. The effect upon him was startling. Even in their Catholicism they betrayed a new world: ‘I used to think my Benedictine friends, monks though they were, even more unclerical than I was.

The rather long quotation with which this paper opens comes from the pen of a man whose life has been spent in the harassing work, of administration in the near East during the troubled years that followed the last war. The point I wish to fasten on is this: in the thorny and arid task of trying to reconcile Arab and Zionist claims in Palestine he turned again and again for solace to literature, music and architecture. For him, as for so many of us, Science, the achievement of man to-day, can bring some measure of bodily comfort, but no comfort of spirit; and I am afraid, in moments of depression, it may occasion a feeling of acute fear, for the part it seems destined to play in the destruction of our civilization.

A war to end war. So they said in 1918, and at Versailles was planned a new settlement and a new start. This, they said, would involve a peace based on forbearance and sacrifice all round. But the peoples, said the statesmen, were not ready for such an enlightened peace. And so the pips had to be made to squeak, and in England there was a khaki election.

What we call the Christian Middle Ages emerge from a time of confusion that separates them from the ordered civilization of the Roman Empire. During that time of confusion there was a progressive disintegration of the old Roman order. The Empire itself broke up, and Europe was subjected to successive waves of barbarian invaders, who, if they brought nothing else, did at least invigorate the West with fresh blood. The barbarian brought with him an energy both physical and moral that provided sufficient human enthusiasm to embrace Christianity, and under Christian inspiration produce something as near a purely Christian culture as mankind has yet reached.

The connecting link between the ancient and medieval world is the Catholic Church, carrying with her down the centuries the cultural heritage which she had already adopted and baptised: this was largely preserved in the living tradition of her worship, which gathered and conveyed in an unbroken stream a thin residuum of human achievement. Much disappeared in the wanton destruction of the great libraries of the ancient world, or through the neglect that comes of despair, when the past glows with a melancholy radiance and the future is veiled by darkness and fear. At such times there comes a point when nothing seems worth saving but the bare fact of existence. In a world of shifting sands the Church remained the one rock of civilization.

In discussing the idealism of the Y.C.W. I am taking a great deal for granted. I am taking it as a proven fact that the conditions in which many of our young people to-day are forced to earn their daily bread are very often, if not usually, diametrically opposed to the ideals of the Christian Gospel. I am also taking it as an assumption that every real Christian will admit the necessity of some form of organized apostolate within the Church to cater for the Young Christian Worker in these anti-spiritual, anti-Christian conditions. Now the Y.C.W. movement claims to cater for this need and can claim a large measure of success in Belgium, France and elsewhere. I put forward here some brief outline of the ideals which have guided the founder of the Movement, Canon Cardijn, ideals which he has expressed many times, ideals which are their own recommendation.

We commence with two principles: the first, that all Young Christian Workers must be missionaries of their milieu, missionaries, that is, in their ordinary surroundings, in the ordinary atmosphere of the workshop, but, above all, missionaries who give a religious soul to every act of their life: and the second, that there is no external means of caring for the Young Worker at the present day. With regard to the first principle, note that I insist on the interior formation of the apostle, for the interior life is a source of activity of itself and in itself to which no other can be compared. Wc recall the words of the incomparable Bossuet: ‘Hands raised aloft in prayer smash more battalions than hands which strike.’ Yes, the inner life of the young apostle must be the branch filled with strong sap, of which his external works are but the flowers.

‘The Church,’ said an ancient writer, ‘was created first o£ all, and for Her sake was the world made.’ Nowadays we seem to have lost much of that lofty sense, that divine view, of the Church in the purposes of God. We tend to consider Her empirically only, as one sect among many, as one section only of the human race. It is one of the functions of the revival of ecclesiology—of that branch of theology which treats of the nature and purpose of the Church —to restore that ancient sense of the Catholicity of the Church, the all-embracing society of redeemed humanity, the Kingdom of God on earth.

Amongst recent literature on the Church, Catholicisme; les Aspects Sociaux du Dogme, by Henry de Lubac, S.J., is of first importance. Based entirely upon the living theology of the Fathers, this excellent book gives a comprehensive account of the social implications of Catholicism. In an important chapter, Le Salut par I’Eglise, Father de Lubac recalls to mind the fact that mankind is naturally and instinctively a social organism, living a single, simple life; disunion and discord, the cancerous growths of sin, have rent asunder this unity, which was a spiritual harmony rooted in the love of God, and its restoration is only possible now, in the existing state of things, through Christ and His Church. ‘Seul I’Idéal que le Christ a transmis a son Eglise est assez pur et assez puissant. . . pour inspirer aux hommes de travailler a leur unité spirituelle, comme seul le Sacrifice de son Sang peut donner l’efficace leur travail.’

It is not easy to express adequately in a single English word the concept implied in the German Grossstadt. It does not mean only metropolis or great city, not necessarily city at all; even a town may have the qualities of a Grossstadt. But if wre have not the word we certainly have the reality. All the great centres of industry, w'here men are gathered together in masses in order to provide for their livelihood and to keep going the great machine of modern civilisation can be described as Grossstädten. In the concrete it is London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle; and even the smaller towns in the industrialised areas share in its spirit, the mining centres of South Yorkshire, the cotton towns of Lancashire, and the dirty villages of County Durham (one of which was described by Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, as the worst in England).

These centres are either sprung out of a transformed countryside or men have come to them from quiet, orderly lives in the country. In either case they present a peculiar problem, which is part of the greater problem of man in the present age. The man of the great city (using this as the nearest equivalent of the German word) is a definite type, quite distinct from the countryman, and requires a distinctive approach on the part of those who are interested in his soul’s welfare.

How to make that approach has been the subject of a number of German brochures and even large books which have appeared in recent years.

The writing of History is commonly advertised as a twofold labour: it is necessary not only to ascertain the facts but to interpret their meaning. The vocation of Karl Marx was scarcely less arduous; for, having established the principle of social evolution, there remained the labour of investing it with a positive content. This precisely was done by postulating an economic interpretation of History.

Sociologists and biologists to whom the whole of nature was the result of development from the simple to the complex (and all reality derived from the homogeneous distribution of matter) could scarcely pass the ball from one to another with more ease than that with which the cloak of Victorian morphology fell to the Sociologist.

Analysing those economic forces whose inter-play was according to him the cause of social behaviour, Karl Marx claimed to have found the key of history. Robert Owen and the Utopians, awaiting a swift transformation of Society without violence, fell by the way even as Utopians have fallen since. Owen’s New Moral World would not dawn. How could it? Evolution, said Marx, was a strictly Gontinouous process and since the operating forces were no longer occult there could be no surprise in store for society. This is all the best part of a century ago; but at no time, surely, has historico-political thought re-acted so obediently to the mood of evolutionists as to-day.

There are still those of us old enough to treasure recollection of history classes in which our media axiomata of all time (and for all time) was the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of the ancient world. Today in an ever increasing number of instances the cosmos-changing mission of Jesus Christ is presented to young students as merely an emphatic point in the cycle, classical, subclassical and Christian.

In the summer of 1904 Brother Bede’s theological studies were interrupted. If he had followed the normal course he would have been ordained priest soon after his twenty-first birthday in August, and continued to study theology either at Hawkesyard, or, more probably, with the Dominicans at Louvain or in Rome. Instead of that he was sent to Oxford in the autumn for a three years’ course of modern history. During his first term there he was a deacon, having been raised to that office on the 19th of September.

This interruption of sacred studies for a secular course in a non-Catholic University was quite without precedent amongst English Dominicans, and though Brother Bede in every way justified the exception made in his favour, the experiment was not repeated in the case of anyone who followed him. Even when he himself became Provincial, students taking a University course in the humanities or secular sciences did so either before joining the Order or at the end of their full course of ecclesiastical study.

Many claim to have had a voice in sending Brother Bede to Oxford, but the deciding factor was clearly his own ardent desire. Though he neither said nor did anything to urge it, everybody knew that he yearned not merely to go there himself, but to see the English Dominicans restored to the position they held in the University from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. His ambition was so consistent with his unselfish zeal for the spiritual welfare of his Order and his country that it turned obstacles into stepping-stones.

The new Criminal Justice Bill which was introduced to the House of Commons towards the end of last year is now ploughing its way in some form or other towards the Statute Book.

Its provisions, which have provoked a good deal of discussion up and down the country, have at any rate served to draw the attention of people to the system under which our prisons are being administered.

With every effort at reform there is always the fear present that we may be in danger of taking the sting out of the punishment of imprisonment; there is always the fear that we may be turning our prisons into homes from home.

The history of English prison administration this century has been one of concession, amelioration and improvement to the point where people have begun to wonder whether the reforms have not been carried too far, having in mind the vicious nature of the crimes which our prisons are frequently called upon to handle.

‘L’Eglise, c’est Jésus-Christ, mais Jésus-Christ répandu el communiqué.’ Bossuet’s words were quoted by Père Clérissac to reinforce his argument that the purpose of the Redemption embraces mankind as a whole before it affects the individual. This dynamic aspect of the life of the Church springs to mind as the new pontificate opens fresh vistas so soon after our reading of the several attempts to assess the achievements of the previous one. In spiritual as well as temporal affairs the stage would seem to be set for a new epoch. The two troubled decades which followed the Armistice of 1918 appear to be leading to a more realistic because less treaty-bound polity, while the conclusion of the pontificate which spanned that anxious period, and alone among reigns survived it with enhanced prestige, has left the new Pope a simpler if no less heavy task.

Before attempting to trace one aspect of this in the special field of the missions abroad, it will perhaps not be out of place to dwell upon the paradoxical fact that more profound progress has been made within it during the past seventeen years than in as many preceding centuries. Today the Church is indeed universal, there is a Chinese, Indian, and African Catholicity as distinct as the English or the American; and this remarkable achievement, because it has taken place while the Church has been subject to considerable difficulties in lands older in the faith, has passed almost unnoticed, even in well-informed circles. But the fact remains that no Pope has been mourned by so numerous or so varied a Church as was Pius XI, rightly surnamed the Pope of the Missions.

If criticism, like charity, begins at home, both virtues are probably served best by examining not the manifest faults, but the hidden ones. If Britain’s official position to-day is that a lead was given to the world and not followed, and that rearmament is a justified and overdue result, it is important to be sure whether or not such is the historical truth. If it is, then the new British policy of 1939 can command the resolute and unreserved support of everyone except a complete pacifist. But if it is not, then the new policy is unsound for lack of a moral certitude, and has none of the easy convenience of unavoidability. And the matter can only be clarified by examining British policy in two ways—our record at key-points, and our greatest post-war achievements as judged by ourselves.

The first key-point occurred very early: in 1919. During the Peace Conference, Britain and the United States had agreed jointly (on June 28th) to strengthen the League system by guaranteeing the territorial integrity of France, backed by force. When the United States Government rejected the Covenant and withdrew from the guarantee, the British Government withdrew also, feeling unable to guarantee the frontiers of France single-handed. But, six years later, we did give precisely such a guarantee, in the Treaty of Locarno. And there is real tragedy in the sequence of events. For, in virtue of the principle that a guarantor can influence the party guaranteed, we have been able since Locarno to influence and to moderate French policy. Had we given the guarantee in 1919 we should have had that power from the start.

In the history of the Church there are many examples of the Faith ‘persecuted in one city fleeing to another’ and eventually finding its way back from the second to the first. The Faith may be sent by one country to another and lost in the sender and sent back by the receiver. A remarkable example of this is the history of the conversion of the British Isles and their subsequent sending of missionaries into Europe.

In South Africa it is heard that when the Apostolic Delegate visited the late Holy Father last year, the Supreme Pontiff, the undying Peter, of whom Newman wrote that ‘in the history of the ages his words have been facts and his commands prophecies,’ said to his representative that the foreign missions represented now his chief hope for Christendom in view of the present outlook in Europe.

And the Church has an inarticulate as well as an articulate voice. It is not without significance that the Foreign Missionary Orders are now overflowing with vocations. Both Voices represent the Infallible Spirit, which may well be stirring the Church to develop rapidly elsewhere before the work of the new vandals be done—if it is to be done. It may be that the trusteeship of the Kingdom of God will pass to other races than the white, at least in part.

Among the various Missions in South Africa at the moment there is one, recognised as one of the most prospering in the world, which suggests very strongly the hope of a new way round. While, to leave violence out of our calculations, it can be said at least that problems and prejudices in Europe are too mixed to allow of any very rapid evangelisation without quite extraordinary miracles, the Basuto people in South Africa are giving an example of mass conversion to the Faith recalling that of first evangelisation of Ireland, the most peaceful and triumphal in history.

‘The Machine has no rights,’ said the philosopher, ‘let us exploit it.’ Let it once be made the slave of all men and who knows what other Athens shall arise. It is a pity that this vision of happiness should ever have been called the Leisure State; for if there is one thing certain about Leisure States it is that nobody wants them. If men and women want leisure it is only in order to act in a way which pleases them. Play itself is activity, and, very often, the more it resembles hard work the more fun it provides. You may distinguish play from work as fun is distinguished from drudgery, but this is a bad distinction, for there is no reason why Mr. Selfrdge should not be right in saying, ‘There is no fun like work.’ Play is best distinguished from work as means is distinguished from end; play is for work and work is for the Last End, or is the Last End if we can call work that operation by which man apprehends God. Play is a sort of artificial work freely undertaken for the sake of more work afterwards. It is true that little children do not normally play games with any thought of working better when they leave off; but this is because, being little children, their play is their work, in much the same way as the play of lambs and kittens is the serious work of lambs and kittens. Play, in the sense of recreation, does not begin until responsible human work begins; until the ‘age of reason.’ Until then the child’s play is just one of the ways by which it quite seriously adjusts itself to the Universe. Its play is all movement and mimicry. It cannot play without playing ‘at’ something, unless it simply jumps about.

Catholics in the Netherlands have always taken a great interest in the film problem. Very soon after the first cinemas appeared (about 1912) there arose among Catholics a movement for the erection of so-called ‘White Cinemas,’ where only those films would be shown which had been properly censored in accordance with the dictates of moral theology. This movement failed, however, owing to lack of experience and of the necessary funds. Meanwhile, at the instance of the Catholic National Purity League, there was set up a board of film-censors operating mainly at Amsterdam. This committee, however, lacked the authority of an official body, and did not sufficiently meet the just claims of the people outside the big cities.

In 1926 The ‘Cinema Act’ was passed in Parliament. Among other things it lays down the principle that, in the Netherlands, onlv those films may be shown publicly which have been passed by the National Board of Public Censors. It also empowers the Board to suppress certain films as being contrarv to good morals and public order. The Committee, moreover, reserves to itself the right to forbid the attendance at certain films by young persons under the age of 14 or 18. With the co-operation of the Catholic politicians a clause was added to the law enabling those institutes and societies which have been set up for the prevention or destruction of social and moral dangers in connection with the film industry, to exercise a further censorship on films already passed by the National Board of Film Censors. These institutes and societies may obtain an official authorization for this purpose from the Home Minister.

It is true, replied the Dutchman, we are a small people without a great future. But when early in the morning we hear a loud knocking at the door, we know it is only the milk.

The Times every morning and the New Statesman every week, those cover serious periodical reading for many of us. From them we should assume that the political weight of Catholicism has been thrown heavily to the right for the last hundred years. The association of Catholics with the forces of tradition is, of course, evident; this, at its worst, has meant subservience of vested interests, and, at its best, rallying with the stable and chivalrous elements of society. It is true that altar and throne, farm and nationality were the causes Catholics fought for most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, and that Liberalismus was, to put it mildly, not favourably regarded in the second period of Pio Nono’s pontificate. What is not so generally appreciated is the strength and official standing of the Labourite movement in the Church.

Père Lacordaire died, he said, an impenitent liberal, the Bishop Baron von Ketteler dug deeper to the roots of reform than did our own Victorian Radicals, and cardinals like Manning, Mermillod and Gibbons were scarcely daffodils that came before the sturzos dared. They were the leaders of a Catholic democratic movement that had reached such proportions by the time of the Europe of Locarno that the action of Catholic groups on the whole—I speak quantitatively—lay with Trade Unionism and Parliamentary Democracy.

Whatever he did was quickly done, but neither hastily nor in a hurry. This is particularly true of his reading and writing, both of which in sum mounted up imperceptibly to a great deal. His published books and pamphlets, of which even his most intimate companions rarely knew anything until they suddenly appeared ready for printing, are but a small part of the writing he left behind him. This consists of official documents, letters and postcards, plans of sermons and lectures, quotations from books read, and the student’s notes to which he was forever adding something. Considering the busy life he led and the little leisure he was allowed, the extent of his reading and his accurate memory of what he read are very remarkable. Much of it was done in trains and on long voyages. At one time he devoted the time spent in the noisy Underground trains in London to the study of Russian, and made some progress with it. He read history seriously all through life. He returned constantly to his early theological and ecclesiastical studies, refreshing them and keeping them up to date by reading new work as it appeared, preferably such as had a practical bearing on his own special duties. For the nourishment of his own soul and those others whom he had helped in their spiritual life he persevered with his study of the mystics.