Possibly the above title might be considered somewhat of a misnomer, for the particular Co-operative Movement I have in mind, although inaugurated in comparatively recent years, is already far past the experimental stage. I refer to the St. Francis Xavier Co-operative Movement, in the Province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Its story reads like a veritable romance, but underneath it all it is easily seen that one of the chief factors at work has been unremitting toil and service on the part of its sponsors, for those less fortunately placed.

A few weeks before he passed away, the late Sir Arthur Currie, Principal of McGill University, Montreal, defining the role of the modern university in what he well described as ‘the desperate battle of modern life,’ said: ‘The University of to-day must not be content to be a mere reservoir of knowledge, a storehouse of equipment, a base of supplies. Rather it must be a creator of forces for moulding human lives.’

The St. Xavier University, a Catholic centre of learning, in the eastern part of Nova Scotia, has in these late years been making a determined effort to do this very thing, and what is more, is succeeding. Unwilling to go on turning out graduates to seek, but not always to find, a place in the world, St. Francis Xavier has taken upon itself the task of endeavouring to lay more solid and stable economic foundations in this particular part of Canada. In other words, these university leaders are fashioning a new life-pattern for Nova Scotia.

Mr. William Teeling has now replied to the many critics of his book The Pope in Politics, which was published in 1937. His reply takes the form of a study of the conditions and prospects of the Catholic Church in Germany, a subject with which he is undoubtedly familiar and about which he can speak with considerable authority. He knows the language and the people well, and has taken pains to interview all kinds of personalities to ascertain the real state of feeling in the country. And though conversations, even with the most varied authorities, are not the most certain way of getting at the real truth, it is scarcely possible to adopt any other method in Germany. The Nazi press is inspired to tell just what the party leaders wish to have announced and the foreign press is often biassed.

The method has its drawbacks, so serious that one has to read the book with some caution. For it is undoubtedly true that it is a very dangerous thing to speak to foreigners about the faults of the system, and it is questionable whether even Mr. Teeling’s interviewing ability would elicit the whole truth about these from any responsible German. It is also a fact that the more highly placed ecclesiastics are rightly unwilling to grant interviews of the type that the author needed for the purposes of publication. Every spokesman, of course, is made anonymous in this book, but even this security would not encourage many to speak quite openly about politics.

In a comparative study of modern French and English culture published in a recent number of the Spectator, Mr. D. R. Gillie commented on the ‘unnatural prolongation of the joint reign of Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw over British reason.’ Whatever explanations may be offered—and Mr. Gillie himself attaches high importance to the success of the Group Movement, despised by the great majority of thinking people—there can surely be no doubting the substantial accuracy of the statement itself. If Mr. Shaw’s influence is more that of an individual and peculiar genius whose strength lies in the field of destructive criticism, Mr. Wells has managed to identify himself with the spirit and ethos of his age in a manner altogether remarkable. He is, as he proudly asserts in his latest work, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, ‘a fair sample of the more progressive thought of my time’ (p. 99), which, as he candidly confesses elsewhere, ‘no doubt owes much more than I realize to the phrases and assumptions of the liberal, protestant, progressive world of half a century ago’ (pp. 110-11). This new book is therefore of particular interest and importance in giving us the summarized thought of one who regards himself above all as a ‘sample of a generation.’

As one reader sees it, the strength of Mr. Wells’s thought seems to lie in three very positive qualities; its consistency, its clarity and, from one aspect, its rationalism. No one can ever mistake his meaning; it is always abundantly dear.

The progress of Catholicism in Africa is so amazing that only the divine character of the Church can explain it. Yet we realize how much remains to be done when we recall the millions of coloured people still untouched by Christianity. And the need is urgent not only amongst indigenous negroes, but also amongst those of such a country as the United States, where live many millions of negroes crying out for the religion of God made Man. In the centre of New York is Harlem, the negro quarter, a town in itself well-nigh cut off from the neighbouring boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx, whilst in the southern States live many millions of negroes in far worse poverty and distress than in the days of slavery. These people want religion, for their simple nature is a religious one. But they are unwilling to accept the Christian religion as they see it practised, or rather distorted and falsified, by the whites. They want rather the riches and power that go with modem materialism and irreligion.

The story of the negro in U.S.A. is a sad one. Every year waves of horror and anger shake the whole of the negro population as fresh lynchings occur with a brutality that is unsurpassed by any other age in the history of this world. The Chinese torture of a thousand slices cannot be more cruel than the white southerner’s use of a blowlamp on a negro suspected of crime.

Are Catholics in the United States, or in the Union of South Africa, caring for these people, influencing them, as they ought? In the days of the Roman Empire there existed slavery, and that slavery was ended by the Catholic doctrine that by nature and birth all men are equal before God.

France, the home of political parties, lias seen the birth not of another party, but of a supra-party group—the ‘Nouvelles Equipes Françaises.’ The NEF, whose daily paper is L'Aube, stands for a united, Christian democracy, based on Christian principles of social justice, liberty and toleration: but it is well aware that such an ideal is not going to be realised without the most generous and whole-uearted work. The congress which it held in Paris last month showed its spirit: I reproduce here the most significant portions of some of the speeches.

The chairman opened the congress by saying that it met under the ‘standard of conquest: the conquest of public minion.’ Financial remedies are insufficient to restore the country. It is necessary to recreate the soul and body of France by reviving her sense of spiritual and human values and by making her into a real community.

The Marquis d'Aragon, known in Oxford and London as well as here for his competence in social problems, described his work in a small village of the South. Mere discussion meetings, he said, are useless: people must first understand what they mean by democracy and spiritual values. We do not wish, he said, to behave like electioneers, and induce people, by fair means or foul, to elect a democrat: we want them to become democratic. We must win their consciences, and save them from finding refuge in authoritarian government out of sheer disgust with the vagueness of our present democratic Government. A disciplined democracy can revise the desire for liberty and for those spiritual and moral values without which realism means abject submission to force, and idealism a fruitless and vague appeal to an unknown god.

‘une belle equipe’ is the title of a stimulating account in the Canadian Revue Dominicaine of the work of the ‘Cerf’ publishing house in Paris:

They are only seven Friars Preachers, but they control one of the most triumphant of the Catholic movements of France, that of ‘Les Editions du Cerf.’ True, they have the wholehearted support of many of their colleagues in the Dominican Order and of a splendid group of the laity. But they alone form the permanent central organisation.

From his earliest days as a Dominican each of them had dreamed of a gigantic apostolate which would utilise modem technical resources of propaganda to the utmost. The great theses of St. Thomas, which had enabled them to penetrate into the heart of the Christian mysteries, seemed to them to be too substantial a nourishment to be served as they stood to the men and women of to-day. So they made up their minds to give a modern presentation to the eternal message of Christ, which their scholastic studies had enabled them more clearly to understand—a presentation adapted to the comprehension of modem men.

It is now many years ago that they began to put their ideal into execution . . . When so many false shepherds were leading the masses astray, when so many demagogues were making themselves the apostles of inhuman causes and leading the people into the slavery of the State, the Machine, the Majority, they proclaimed aloud the claims of God and the dignity of the human person . . . They must address living thought to living men in living language.

Marchenoir in Le Désespéré is generally taken as the prototype of the writer. In this character Léon Bloy draws the portrait of a man of intense and burning faith, but given to passion and governed not by reason, but by feeling; he gives the picture of an unrecognised and embittered artist, of one who with the vision of a saint could not practise even ordinary virtue, and who, driven to despair by the consequences of his acts, becomes almost insane through his capacity for suffering. This portrait, however, is neither exact nor complete; Léon Bloy himself was far more of a Christian and far less of a lunatic than Marchenoir.

Round this saint manqué, this vagabond accompli, this grotesque figure surrounded by poverty and degradation, the prey of passion, and yet dispenser of spiritual gifts, a peculiar interest centres to-day. To deny Léon Bloy’s spiritual influence would be not only injurious but unjust. He was responsible for some of the most remarkable conversions of the last fifty years, those of Jacques Maritain and de la Meer Walcheren among others.

International War

Sir,—In your recent issues the articles and correspondence on war show a marked tendency to discuss secondary problems rather than the central one; emphasis seems to be upon the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the means employed. But, if a man is unjustifiably attacked by an aggressor—both parties being conscious of where the unjust aggression lies—he is presumably morally entitled, though not morally compelled, to defend himself, and in so doing need not be restricted to hitting above the belt; he may ‘hit hard, hit quick, hit anywhere.’ If a nation is a political, social, mental and moral unity, such as the theory of nationalism implies, it is difficult to see why the nonsoldiering element should be morally entitled to preferential treatment and be regarded as immune from attack. I submit, however, that the theory in question is properly indefensible, and would ask Fr. Victor White before concluding his war articles to give some attention to it and to the logical conclusions that follow its denial.—Yours, etc.,

John Nibb.

C.T.S. IN CHINA

Sir,—I take the liberty of asking for some space in your valuable paper in order to convey an earnest appeal to all your readers who are interested in missionary work.

All those who have followed the development of the war in China may be surprised to hear that, although hundreds of churches have been destroyed and flourishing Christian units have been dispersed, still the war has given an opportunity to the Church to show its charity, and this has brought about a very considerable movement of mass conversions.

The same clothes, the same swing music, the same technological thinking, the same standardised responses, the same dances, the same transport communications: in other words, the same standardisation all the world over. ‘This uniformity is quite another thing than a structure of civilisation properly speaking, it is of an order not specifically human.’ The Manichee, in his contradictory thinking, desired to attain to a univocal perfection, to be swallowed up in the principle of good like a Buddhist in his Nirvana, to negate his own body to the point of race-suicide, a Pharisee concerning matter and profoundly anti-social. Modern man is an inverted Manichee: again desiring a univocal perfection, in a dialectic not of spirit but of matter, regarding the spirit as nothing or hating it as evil, enslaving mind and responsibility to the evolution of technique, exalting his own blood in the interests of race purity, exploiting and commercialising intelligence, and profoundly anti-personal. How true that Marx is the obverse of Hegel. The outcome of such mass-education is anarchy of thinking and feeling, against which we childishly protect ourselves by the sameness of our clothes.

Let us isolate one noteworthy aspect of this situation. To much modern thinking, the intelligence is a dangerous faculty, an anti-vital machine that skims the cream off things, that divides person from person and class from class, like the cathode rays that disintegrate alpha particles: it is the very principle of disintegration. The sub-human Utopia of the Communists, on the other hand, is the achievement of a material integration, it may be a leisure state to which technological progress will tend or an economic collectivity of the masses achieved in a strictly political field.