Is the Church a democracy? It is a question which cannot be answered by a simple yes or no, and without preliminary definition of the term. Democracy does not necessarily imply the rule of all by all; it does imply first of all a society in which the citizens are complete individuals, persons, whose life and destiny the State must not subjugate to its own purposes, but serve; and it does imply, secondly, that the individuals contribute, according-to their different gifts and therefore their different functions, to the shaping and growth of the life of society. And is the Church a democratic society in this sense? There are many, catholic as well as non-catholic, who would be inclined to answer no. Information, direction, power, they would say, all alike come from above ; for the rank and file there is nothing to do but to receive what is given and to do what is commanded.

It is easy to find solid arguments for this view. Faith and law and power are indeed given from above; the Church, the ecclesia docens, has the office of guarding and giving them ; you find in the Gospel the picture of the sheep and the Shepherd, and what have the sheep to do but to obey, and be fed by, the Shepherd? What has the ordinary catholic to do but obey his pastors and so make his way to heaven?

We have set down these extracts in the time-order in which they were written and not in the time-order of the recorded facts. Thus St. Luke's record comes last. Yet it narrates facts earlier than those recorded in the three earlier Epistles of St. Paul.

The principle here involved is of fundamental importance in deciding the value of facts omitted by an earlier writer but recorded by a later.

The first extract is from the first letter St. Paul wrote to the much-tried converts in Corinth. This unique letter—almost the most characteristic of his letters—remains the bridge between the Epistle to the Galatians in all later epistles. When we reflect that it gives St. Peter a place of primacy four times, that it has the very form of consecrating the Blessed Sacrament, and that it discusses almost in philosophical terms the doctrine of bodily resurrection—we may wonder why St. Paul sends the salutation of a man Aquila and (presumably) his wife Priscilla.

The Aquinas Society of London came into existence naturally and, so to say, insensiblement among a little group of students who had been attending the pioneer lectures on the Summa Theologica that were given some twenty years ago by Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., at St. Peter’s Hut, Westminster, under the auspices of the University Extension Board.

Soon after the last war Father Vincent had conceived the idea of making the doctrine of Aquinas available to ordinary lay men and women. It was an immense and individual act of charity on the part of a poor friar who endeavoured in this way to share his intellectual riches and the special inheritance of his Order with lay folk for whom no other means of Catholic intellectual formation existed at the time. The success of these lectures on the Summa led in a short while to an expansion of the work, and in a few years three series of lectures on Theology and Ethics, and the History of Medieval Philosophy and a series on the Scriptures were being given by the Dominican Fathers at St. Peter’s Hut. Among the students who attended these courses of lectures were some who were destined in the course of years to occupy office and authority in the State. Who shall tell the full story of the influence these courses had on the lives of individuals and on the public life of the community?

Not long ago I was honoured by an invitation to address the Aquinas Society which I gladly accepted, choosing as my subject the title of this article. Since then it has been suggested that I should publish as an article the substance of that address, and I readily do so. It would be impossible to reproduce the address itself, because it was delivered from notes which were no more than headings, and these I destroyed as soon as the address was delivered. That, however, is of no consequence. What is important is not to recover what was said on a particular occasion, but to promote consideration of the teaching of St. Thomas in its bearing on the needs of our time.

I must make clear at the outset the fact that I am not in any serious sense a student of St. Thomas—as, for example, my father was. I have read a considerable portion of his writings with close attention, but without that perpetual comparison of one passage with another which is alone entitled to be called ‘study ‘in relation to any great writer. I speak therefore from a general impression which may be due to interpreters and critics of St. Thomas as much as, or more than, to himself. If so, those who are real students of his work can easily confute me, but may none the less be glad to have their attention called to points at which the current presentations of his doctrine have produced on one mind at least an impression calling for correction.

Amidst the turmoils of the war, of which the Eternal City itself has become one of. the centres, the Holy Father has issued two Encyclicals devoted entirely to subjects interest in which is apparently confined to theologians. These are the Encyclical oh biblical studies and the earlier Mystici corporis Christi. The encouragement given through the first of these Encyclicals to the study of Holy Scripture is of the greatest significance with regard to countries which, in that respect, still labour under ideas formed during the Penal times. But what interest to these is the refutation of certain theological errors as given in the Encyclical Mystici Corporis? Where, in English Catholic literature, have the excesses of the liturgical movement or the exaggerations of the teaching on the mystical Body of Christ, referred to in that Encyclical, been advocated?

The passages in which the Encyclical concerns itself with those errors clearly refer to the Continent, in particular to Central Europe. If we regard the spiritual position of German-speaking Catholics as one of the most important points in the reconstruction of Europe and its Christian tradition, those errors gain in topical significance. The history of Catholic theology and philosophy of the 19th century reveals two main influences. The one, mainly concerning philosophy and dogma, originated from the philosophical movement known as German idealism. Far from being confined to Germany, however, it comprised, in its very origin and foundation, at least France as well. It influenced not only German Catholics whose teachings the Church condemned, such as Hermes, Guenther, Frohschammer and in later years Schell, but also French and Italian thinkers including Lammenais, Bautain and Rosmini.

There are 21 of them in the territory of the Republic of Poland, 21 of Latin rite besides three of Greek and one of Armenian rite. The diocese of Wloclawek, of which I have been the Ordinary since 1929, does not differ much, in pastoral affairs, from its neighbouring dioceses of Eastern and Central Poland. Hence a brief survey of its history and of its state on the eve of the war,'will give quite a good picture of the whole Polish Church.

The capital of the diocese, Wloclawek, called in the Latin documents of the Middle Ages ‘Vladislavia,’ is situated on the left bank of the Vistula, at the place where the river has run a third of its way from Warsaw to the sea. At first the religious centre of this district (fertile Cuiavia) was Kruszwica, to-day a small town on the edge of lake Goplo. There Bishop Lucidus, native of Italy, developed his apostolic activity in the last decades of the tenth century, soon after the Poles had become Christian. He and his 13 successors—called by the Polish annalist, Jan Dlugosz, ‘bishops of Kruszwica’—were most probably missionary bishops, without a strictly specified territory. It was only in the thirteenth century that Michael Godziemba (1222-52), the first bishop of Polish extraction, left Kruszwica for the banks of the Vistula and founded (c. 1230) the See of Wloclaw, as Wloclawek was then called. The foundation's of the original Cathedral, which like all the castles in Poland at that time, was built of wood, can be still seen in the basement of a house on the bank of the river.

London was founded for practical reasons on ia gravel terrace, some two miles broad, lying north of the Thames and east of the River Fleet, and almost certainly it stood there before the Roman invasion. The Romans built a wall round it, and are primarily responsible for its commercial importance since they made it the chief centre of their road system. The Romans left London not only defensible but also accessible by roads as well as by waterways. So it became the capital first of the kingdom of Essex and then of England; it was the diocesan town of a see instituted by Pope Gregory of which the first ibishop was ordained by Saint Augustine.

Who were the men who first dared or were obliged to live outside the walls, forgoing the safety and privileges these enclosed, the men who began the expansion of London? The earliest evidence of suburban building occurs in the tenth century when the Danes, whom the Londoners barred at Ludgate, made the settlement along the river strand which was to name the church of St. Clement Danes. Outcasts of one kind or another : such were most of the mediaeval suburbanites. About the eastern and northern gates—Cripplegate, Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate—unenfranchised and poor labourers lodged themselves as best they could. The southern bank, the Borough of Southwark, was a rath'er disreputable quarter, for it contained both prisons and certain areas in which immunity from legal arrest was enjoyed. It-was the Bohemia of mediaeval London, and maintained this character in the sixteenth century when playhouses were set up on the southern bank, the city being inhospitable to dramatic art.

In a real sense the history of the Church is the history of its saints. For the Church is a living society, and its life is made most manifest through those of its members who are honoured for the integrity of their faith and the holiness of their lives—the saints. If, then, as Leo XIII. said in a famous utterance, the Church has nothing to fear from a truly objective investigation of its history, the lives of its saints can in no way be dimmed by a scientific study of their sources.

But there is a difference. Saints are persons, and persons are loved; round their memory there develops something deeper than documents. The acta of popes and councils are generally available for the study of scholars; their appraisal, while demanding an understanding of the circumstances and persons that gave them expression, is primarily a matter of the authenticity of texts, the chronology of events. In the case of the beatification and canonisation of saints in the modern period, indeed, the Roman decrees, arrived at after a scrupulous examination of evidence, provide an exact account of the reasons for public veneration of these holy ones of the Church. Yet even here there are innumerable factors, reflected in popular devotion, which can scarcely be looked for in a legal document. But in the earlier ages of the history of the Church, and especially in its remoter provinces, the cultus of the saints necessarily lacked that careful regulation which nowadays is taken for granted.

The task of reconstruction which faces the present generation is indeed overwhelming. It requires not only vast economic and political readjustments. It involves also the spiritual regeneration of Europe. To-day Europe is threatened far more seriously than was the Roman Empire by the barbarian invaders for the barbarian invaders could only destroy its body, its spirit proved indestructible. It was powerful enough to wean the conqueror from’ his barbarous ways, and to bring forth that flower of civilization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With its spirit the grandeur that was Rome lived on, shaping the Empire of Charlemagne, that high - minded attempt to express the spiritual unity of Europe in a political form, permeating the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, more a dream than a reality. In a thousand ways it moulded the thoughts of Europeans, a tower of strength, a pattern of virtue, an inspiration to action. It lived on in the Church.

Europe derives her strength and her mission from Christianity alone. But the European nations have recklessly squandered their Christian patrimony. They have allowed paganism to raise its head. They have succumbed to the spirit of materialism. They have drifted so far away from God and His Christ that the present age can justly be styled the post-Christian era. They are even now preparing to settle the world without recourse to its Creator, disregarding His laws, in a spirit diametrically opposed to that of His love.

In its beginnings the thing we call a University ran ahead of its idea of itself. It grew, not unintelligently, but with little, if any, reflection on itself. Subsequently, and especially in the last hundred years, there has been much speculation about what a University should be; and there have been many experiments in erecting theory into fact. The palm for the best theory unquestionably goes to John Henry Newman, and so to the Catholics of England, whom he claimed, and is now allowed, to represent. No theory, anywhere, remains more remote from fact than this remains in England.

This may be blameworthy, but there is some excuse for it. The English are not idealists, their genius is practical. They do not proceed from ideas to action : they act first and think afterwards, with a tendency, stronger in each generation, to think that what they have done or left undone was rightly done or left undone because ‘twas they themselves that did it or did it not. On this general ground, and on the ground of its particular application to education, especially University education, the claim of English Catholics to be truly English cannot be denied. In this characteristic the Irish amongst them are thoroughly anglicized. As a body Catholics in this country are not at all dissatisfied with what they have done or not done for themselves in education these last hundred years. Their dissatisfaction is almost wholly with what others have done or not done for them. Exceptions there are: mostly converts like Newman himself, and idealists like him. Like him they love the life of the mind, and follow it even to its own surrender in faith; and like him, until they are safely dead, they become generally suspect of not being quite English. All this, though irritating, is excusable in England. Even the Universal Church finds it, though vexatious, tolerable.

Spirit of understatement, possess us now! This book is worthy of its subject both in size and texture; and complete with bibliography and index, is a bit of ‘orl right ‘as Chesterton’s hansom cabby said when he had driven a long way up a blind alley. The 574 pages are packed well with matter of almost all possible variety and charm, and he who reads it through will want it by him to read in and out of. Labour of love it must have been, for the gifted authoress hints at thousands upon thousands of pages (even of Hansard) carefully perused and sifted, with thousands of letters either judiciously condensed or quoted at length. Indeed no pains have been spared to make it another Boswell, a super-Boswell let us say.

For Johnson’s world was smaller if more impressive than the world of Chesterton, and it did not press so close around him, nor didi Johnson re-act so vigorously or so ubiquitously to every breeze that blew from the great deep. Whether one came from the provinces with the hayseed in one’s hair, or took tea with Chesterton in darkest Yorkshire, one was at a loss for nearly half a day to guess what were biting the big man at the hour of contact. For he had informations from sources unknown, tips from horses’ mouths over and above the mystery of Fleet Street, tips which made him more alive to current events than the whole Press, which after all is but the opium of the people. This serious side of his life is well and truly set forth with growing emphasis throughout the body of the book, and his tragic interest in the Marconi matter is juridically dealt with by the author’s barrister husband, Frank Sheed.

Provided we do not blind ourselves to its present defects, nor leave its undeveloped potentialities unexplored, our British Commonwealth system of regulating-international affairs can justly be regarded as an object lesson for those who will shape the peace. General Smuts has described it as ‘this greatest experiment in political organisation, this proudest political structure of time, this precedent and anticipation of what one hopes may be in store for human society in the years to come.’ On the other hand, Lionel Curtis, who shared with Smuts and others the task of creating the Union of South Africa, makes the following criticism in ‘Decision and Action ‘(Oxford University Press) :—

If we are wise, we shall study, with equal impartiality, these apparently conflicting but really complementary points of view. Curtis divides political systems into two kinds; organic (states such as Great Britain, federations such as the U.S.A.) and inorganic (confederations, alliances, leagues). The British Commonwealth he regards as a mixture of both, and cites Mr. Menzies of Australia to prove that its effective functioning is primarily due to some degree of hegemony exercised by the Mother country. His book demonstrates that inorganic systems are unstable and that as regards international coalitions for war purposes ‘history, when it comes to be written, always shows how the inorganic bond of alliance hastened defeat or delayed victory.’

It is not a problem, but a mystery : a mystery, that is, as sin is a mystery, and the redemption. In fact, the so-called Jewish problem is an aspect of the mystery hidden from eternity, the divine plan for man’s salvation, made known by the prophets and by Christ, worked out in history but not fully accomplished or revealed in all its grandeur until the end of time. There is therefore no solution of the Jewish ‘problem’ without the intervention of grace, no understanding of it apart from supernatural revelation. It belongs to ‘those things which proceed from the will of God alone and are beyond all rights of the creature ‘and, therefore, according to the sound principle of St. Thomas, ‘can only be known to us as far as they are handed down in Sacred Scripture, through which the divine will is made known ‘(Summa Theologica, III, q. i, a. 3).

To this theme of salvation, even with the emphasis on the place of Israel in it, the whole of the Scriptures are devoted ; but the locus classicus is the Epistle to the Romans ix-xi. Leaving aside all the details of interpretation, concentrating on the clearest and most generally accepted sense of St. Paul’s words, three facts arc certain :

1. The Jewish nation once possessed a unique—and, in fact, the highest—vocation among the nations of the earth ;

2. They failed, as only the noblest can fail, terribly and—but for God’s grace—without hope of restoration ;

3. Before the end they will return, and their restoration will be as glorious as their failure was shameful, for it will correspond to the grandeur of their first calling.

It is nearly twenty years since Eric Gill wrote in Blackfriars, ‘It has remained for one unworthy to put his pen to the word, and therefore to the argument, which shall give Capitalism and its attendant monster, Industrialism, their death-blow. The word is Responsibility.’

The argument, that Capitalism (production for money, in such sense that all things made are means of making money) and Industrialism (production by machinery with the working man as a sentient part of it) both ‘reduce the workman to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility,’ was not and is not difficult to follow. It was and is so clearly true as to raise at once the scandal of truth. It was received with applause as a brilliant argument, and it was rejected almost universally, by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, as an impractical one. There were also the incidental reactions of those who were ‘sneeped’ (as they say in the Midlands) by the terms in which it was expressed. ‘Sub-human, indeed !’ and so on.

So, if there was a great cloud of dust put up when Eric was here to press home his own arguments, there is danger now that the word, his word, should be altogether obscured. For the social reformers were, in the main, not really interested, and the interested parties, in the main, wanted his word silenced. It is more than time, therefore, for a restatement.

God is. A New Order cannot be made without God. To some these things will seem banal; to others, conventionally devout nonsense. Nothing is more important, few things more urgent, than to show they are neither banal nor nonsensical. It needs no showing, once understood the meaning of those first two words, ‘God is’; but we are in unprecedented danger of not understanding. Men have attained such control over the natural order and such sufficiency in the artificial (successful war does but further the process) as to have lost nearly all sense of dependency and insufficiency. With that sense goes the natural sense of God. Ideas of God may survive, but too often notional only, conventional; and sometimes, in journalism almost always, useful. As long as we are not as serious and at as great pains at knowing-and realising God for Who He Is as are secular investigators at planning and reorganising, we have only ourselves to blame that the public be interested in plans and! not in churches. Nor should we too glibly prophesy the ruin of the godless order; planning is not a whit the less efficient and administrable in the short run for being without God; it is merely soulless; only in the very long run is it doomed. But its spiritual poverty as long as it lasts, and its final ruin woud be imputable not to the planners, but to ourselves who failed to plan divinely; who failed to sift the dross of religious sentimentality and convention from the gold of God, and left God to be abandoned.

French Canada is a decided asset to Canada, and the existence of the French Canadians of great political and cultural significance to America. French-speaking Canadians overflow the boundaries of the Province of Quebec, spill down into the New England States, down into the Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, and are increasing in ever growing numbers across the broad top of Ontario, and along the vast flat spaces of the Prairie Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. They are amongst the few peoples in the world who have assimilated western culture and have an increasing birth-rate. From the comparatively small group of French emigrants who established themselves in Lower Canada three hundred years ago, the French Canadians today number over three and a half millions. This phenomenal increase is so extraordinary that it is worth pointing out that at one time the French Canadians had the highest birth-rate in the world. It has fallen much lower in recent years although it is still relatively much higher than that of its English-speaking neighbour Province of Ontario.

The Dominican map of Poland is a queer one. It is true that one can hardly find a town in Poland without a Dominican church and priory (the fathers numbered more than 2,000 and had about 200 houses at the first partition in 1772), but the churches do not belong now to the Order and the priories are being used as schools or prisons. For in the provinces occupied by Russia and Germany in 1772 and 1795, i.c. in 80% of the Polish territory, the religious life was proscribed and the monasteries confiscated. What we see now on the Dominican map is the result of this historical fact, combined with the striving of the new Polish Province to re-occupy its right place in Catholic life of the whole country.

So it happens that the bulk of the priories is situated in the south, in the former ‘Galicia.’ There the Dominicans had eleven out of their 16 houses which were nourishing in 1939—among them the venerable Monastery of Cracow, tlie great tormer ‘studium generale’ of Podkamien with about 300 cells, and the actual seat of the Provincial with its fine baroque church at Lwow. The other priories are small and unimportant relics of the time when the Austrian Government allowed the religious orders to exist only on condition that they occupied themselves exclusively in plain parish work.

Christians have, during the last nineteen centuries, talked and written a vast deal about the Jews and Jews have talked and written a fair amount about Christians : in both cases the percentage of rubbish has been considerable. It is comforting to think that in this special number of Blackfriars the usual proportion will be reversed and sense will predominate greatly over nonsense. Indeed, the nonsense will probably be, if at all, in a very mild and inoffensive form. Naturally the present contribution is not included in the last remark.

For thirty years at least I have been a frequent talker and writer on this subject. Few have pronounced or written the word ‘Jew’ as often as myself. That word, lovely in itself and in its meaning— it derives from ‘Judah’ (the ‘praise of Jehovah’)—has at times, as the result of repeated use, lost something of its sweet aroma.

In the early months of what the blurb of a recent modest publication kindly calls my ‘campaigning,’ my conscience accuses me of having made several silly utterances on the subject, for which there lingers in my sub-consciousness a smouldering sense of shame. Some extenuation of guilt may be found in the fact that Judeology—to give it a high-sounding name—is a difficult science, presenting problems comparable almost to those that beset the hapless wight who tries to understand Predestination or Bimetahsm. Anyone who would expound its mysteries must qualify for the task by a course of what Virgil, ni fallor, styles ‘labor improbus.’ As a preliminary, he must, as far as may be, purge his soul of prejudice—a most insidious and deep-rooted disease—and beware also of every form of sentiment that savours of sentimentality. He must endeavour to be objective, concrete and scientific. Let him make sure of his facts and rigorously test his conclusion.