According to statistics lately published and confirmed through investigations made among prisoners-of-war, ninety-three per cent, of the German people are still members of Christian denominations. Whilst it is hardly necessary to discuss the political aspects of this fact, I should like to make a few points regarding practical religious life in Germany which might contribute to an appreciation of that figure.

In justification of my venture, I may say that I am an off-spring of a family which for several generations past has played a prominant part in German Protestant church life and scholarship. I myself, through the study of Protestant theology, have become a Catholic. Educated in a purely Protestant part of Germany, I lived and worked for the last seven years previous to my emigration in one of the Catholic centres of the country. Living as I do at present in, I daresay, fairly close contact with Catholic life in these countries, I feel that perhaps the most important point in appreciating the religious situation in Germany is an understanding of the relations between Protestants and Catholics in that country. I must confine myself to some points which incoherent in themselves are all still up-to-date.

Roughly speaking and from a merely statistical view-point, Germany can be subdivided into a Protestant North and a Catholic South and West. However, whole provinces of Southern Germany, such as Wiirttemberg and the Palatinat, are predominantly and most actively Protestant, whilst Miinsterland, Ermland and Silesia have been, especially during the last twenty years, leading centres of Catholic life in Germany.

Many tributes have been paid to the exceptional character and gifts of the late Fr. George Fressanges, who met his death so tragically at the height of his powers in the Ilford train crash in January. He has been the subject of a sermon preached in Norwich Cathedral; the leader of the Nonconformists in Norwich has written of him as a ‘Man of God,’ a saint; and the Catholic recognition has been widespread. But the breadth of Fr. Fressanges’s character and accomplishments was so extensive that no attempt has as yet been made to convey a whole portrait of the man,, nor could it be for several years. But while we hope that eventually some worthy biography shall appear to assist Catholicism in England, it may be of value not only to the future biographer but to those who will be built up or ‘edified’ by the example of a great priest to outline one aspect of Fr. Fressanges’s life.

He was ordained by Bishop Youens in the last days of 1936, so that his life as a priest lasted just over seven years. The first six months were spent as a curate at Sheringham, where there was not very wide scope for his inexhaustible vitality; the remaining six and a half years he spent at Norwich. During that time he was never more than a curate, being on the eve of receiving a parish of his own when he met his death.

Mythology is replete with stories of the childlike wisdom which dares and does where the wise and prudent of this world quail and fail. Fr. Witcutt knows the value of mythology and has learned its lesson. His Catholic Thought and Modern Psychology is no profound and learned academic treatise. It is, on the contrary, a naive book; indeed a spritely book. Neither the depths of the unconscious nor the heights of theological and philosophical speculation hold any terrors for him. From one to the other he passes—we might almost say he gambols—with enviable ease and assurance, unintimidated by any excessive concern for the’ complexities of the problem he has set himself, or any inhibiting regard for pettifogging accuracy.

It would be a great mistake to neglect his book on that account. ‘Some,’ said Aristotle, ‘require exactness in everything, while others are annoyed by it. . . for there is something about exactness which seems to some people to be mean. . . .; hence one must be trained how to take each kind of argument.’ The job Fr. Witcutt has undertaken desperately needed doing. For it is a job which the pundits neither of ‘Catholic Thought ‘nor of ‘Modern Psychology ‘have hitherto attempted to do; a job which they still seem far from being ready to do. From among the Catholics, Dalbiez, it is true, after a magnificent restatement of Freud, and a less satisfying endeavour to free Freud’s psychology from Freud’s philosophy, has attempted a dubious mutual non-intervention pact between psychoanalysis and religion. Alters has modified Adler in a direction more acceptable to Catholics; at the expense, however, of abandoning depth-psychology altogether. There has been a good deal of unprincipled eclecticism. But at co-ordination and synthesis there has hitherto been little or no attempt.

The address by His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury to the London Aquinas Society was a memorable and important event. To such of us as are students of St. Thomas, teachers and thinkers guided by his principles and thought, it was a very great encouragement. The mere fact that a contemporary thinker and scholar of the calibre of Dr. Temple, who is holder of the most eminent position in the Anglican Communion and exercises so considerable an influence on national life, should think it worth his while to turn from his many and pressing public duties to address us, was an event which should not lightly be forgotten, and which should provide us with stimulus for many years to come.

But his address was something more than an encouragement; it was a very serious challenge. Dr. Temple is a Christian leader who has shown himself to be quite exceptionally keenly aware of ‘modern needs ‘and full of ‘compassion for the multitude.’ His realisation of the unique role which pupils of St. Thomas have to play in meeting those needs and in providing for the hunger of the multitude presents us with claims which we dare not disregard. The very fact that he addresses us ‘from outside ‘makes his claims upon our attention all the more compelling. For must it not be admitted that we thomists are sometimes apt to forget our responsibilities to the world and the age in which we find ourselves, to live and work in academic isolation, too little heedful of the crying spiritual and intellectual needs of others and of our own obligation to impart to them the heritage entrusted to us—forgetful even of the opening words of the Summa itself anti of the whole purpose for which it was written?

Strictly, there is no such body as the Catholic Parents’ Association. The various parochial units may be linked with a central council, and, as in some dioceses, with a diocesan council, but in general each local association is self-contained, and has its parochial or district denomination. There is divergence in constitution and even in title, and that absolute uniformity is undesirable is evidenced by the declaration of the Bishops of England and Wales on 24th August last that ‘The Hierarchy have given full approval to the formation of Parochial and Diocesan Associations of Catholic Parents under the direction of the Bishops of the various dioceses. But they do not approve the formation of the National Federation of Catholic Parents’ Associations, nor of its appeal for funds.’

The Constitution approved for one English Archdiocese details the purpose of the Association thus:

• (a) To learn and teach the duties and rights of parents.

• (b) To promote and safeguard Catholic educational interests and the care of Catholic youth.

• (c) To encourage representation of Catholic parents on public educational bodies.

• (d) To encourage the practice of family prayers in every Catholic household of the parish.

This is a fourfold aim whose effectiveness will be in the efficient carrying out of the primary provision. The average Catholic, even if he or she has remembered the catechism teaching of younger days, is not so deeply versed in Catholic doctrine as to have clear notions on parental duties and rights in education. How many Catholics could answer correctly three elementary questions on them? The fact of State education, moreover, has familiarised nearly everybody with an almost Communistic conception of the State as the universal parent. It is the old story of an antiCatholic idea fraudulently winning assent as a principle through popular acceptance.

It is not my intention in my description of the University of Malta in any way to suggest that this institution is a model, or even a particularly good example of what a Catholic University should be. It is, however, very well worth studying for two reasons. First, because it is unique of its kind, being the only Catholic University (I suppose) in the world which is also a State University supported and controlled by a non-Catholic government. Second, because its history and present state show very clearly that in order to secure a thorough and adequate intellectual and spiritual Catholic formation it is not enough to establish an officially Catholic University, with statutes which make the Catholic religion the basis of instruction and a staff of teachers who profess the Catholic religion. That is only the beginning. It is still necessary to give the body a living and reasonable soul, to make the University a real University and its Catholicism a living and productive faith. The University of Malta never seems quite to have found its soul.

It was founded by Grand Master Pinto de Fonceca of the Sovereign Order of Malta in 1769, and endowed with the buildings and property of the College of the Society of Jesus which the Grand Master had suppressed in 1768. Perhaps something of the atmosphere of Baroque Erastianism has clung about the University from its beginnings. Certainly the Founder, Grand Master Pinto, was a typical enough representative of that pompous and spiritually barren autocracy. From 1769 to the present day the University has continued to exist and function without a break except for a short period during the French occupation of Malta in the time of Napoleon.

At the beginning of this essay we noted that what a philosopher, reflecting on poetry, observes first of all is that it belongs to the sphere of Art or productive activity. Now the proper end of Art is not knowledge but production or ‘creation,’ not in the manner of physical nature, as radium produces helium or one living thing another, but in the free manner of the mind; it is intellectual productivity ad extra.

Of itself the intellect is expressive; it produces within itself its ‘mental words’ which, besides being the media through which it knows things, are also effects of its own spiritual plenitude, expressions or inward manifestations of the things it knows.

Further, this plenitude is a superabundance which tends of itself, naturally, to an external expression and manifestation, to a song. Not only does the mind’s vitality form words within, it tends also to overflow into works; and this with a natural need or desire which reaches out over the frontiers of intellect itself, and which therefore can only be realized with the aid of the will and the other appetites whose movement, whereby the intellect goes out from itself following a desire natural to itself, is initiated and nourished at its source by the intellect, in such a way that, following this start, they predetermine in a general way the primary tendency of the operative intellect in a poetic (in the aristotelian sense) or in a practical direction. Once this original determination has been given, the ‘poetic ‘activity develops along a line that is much more purely intellectual—the human will with its characteristic ends and purposes being far less involved—than is the line of moral activity (Ethics as a mode of the practical).

Among the causes which have contributed to the tragedy of modern German history the decline of family life may safely be considered one of the most important factors. This decline has, indeed, affected almost all European countries, but, if Russia be excepted, none so deeply and powerfully as Germany. It may, perhaps, sound strange to non-Catholics that the condition of a healthy family life should be the esteem of virginity : for the Church has often been falsely accused of despising marriage, because she demands celibacy from her priests and religious. But even in the ancient Western world the family was nowhere stronger than in pagan Rome, where the Vestal virgins tended the sacred fire, the symbol of the home, from which springs all true civilization. It is, therefore, not surprising that the beginning of the disruption of German family life can be traced to Luther who, himself a monk who had broken his vow of chastity in order to marry a runaway nun, to the scandal even of many of his devoted followers, officially sanctioned the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse. The case of Luther may serve to illustrate the fact that, if virginity is not valued, there is no reason why continence should be esteemed in a wife or husband, except perhaps in the former to ascertain the parentage of the children.

But there is another side of the matter. St. Thomas links virginity closely to the contemplative life. ‘The end,’ he says, ‘which renders virginity praiseworthy, is that one may have leisure for Divine things.’ And moreover the integrity of the chaste mind is necessary for the loving perception of truths that are beyond reason. The Germans are a naturally contemplative race—the names of St. Hildegard, Master Eckhart, Tauler and Suso are ample evidence of that.

The youth movement has received an enthusiastic reception from the Press and little adverse criticism has been made. There is, however, much criticism that does not come into print and it is the purpose of this article to examine objections to the movement and to suggest remedies where criticism is well founded.

The prevailing attitude of the objectors is suspicion derived from the national abhorrence of uniform and regimentation together with the example of dictator states and the débacle of British Fascism. But on the whole fears are aroused, not by what the movement is, but by what it may become ; to some the exploitation of youth for political ends is a potential danger that may well develop with the extension of central control. This danger is a real one and is bound up with the question of vested interest within the movement itself.

At the moment the activities of youth clubs are somewhat decentralised and organisers are given a free hand. This is good; initiative and individuality can play their part by modifying activities in accordance with the needs of the neighbourhood. Should the hand of bureaucracy fasten down on the movement, control may deprive it of its freedom and elasticity and result in its becoming a soulless and regimented function of the State.

Shortly before the fall of France, there appeared in La Vie Intellectuelle a striking article by a French historian, G. de Reynold. The writer was then living in the centre of Europe and was thus very favourably placed to study current events. Many of his reflections are as relevant to-day as they were in 1940, and might prove of interest to a larger public. It is with this object in view that I would like to refer to them here.

De Reynold begins his article by putting forward the opinion that Europe, geographically speaking, can scarcely be considered a continent; her space is too restricted, her peoples too mixed and individual to produce a homogeneous civilisation. She is more in the nature of an Asiatic peninsula. Had it not been for Christianity she would by this time have been absorbed by Asia; yet we find her still the ombril of the world, fitted by Providence for a high and unique destiny. With Europe’s natural order and arrangement— easy access to the sea and splendid internal lines of communication— it is only when Christianity weakens within her borders that a general disintegration occurs—and M. de Reynold is of opinion that should there ever be total apostasy it would be a sure presage of death, a death heralded by a long agony. The weakening in Christian beliefs has always been the forerunner of some Asiatic assault, or at any rate of the imminent danger of such a thrust. This danger is enhanced by the fact that the Asiatic conception of Empire, ever since the days of Diocletian, has exercised a distorting and sinister influence on the European conception of the Imperium Romanum. Asia is a continent of ‘worlds,’ its pattern is the Empire, whereas Europe is composed of nations and its pattern is the ‘kingdom.’

The history of the word ‘poetry’ seems to me most instructive. Only quite recently has it begun to mean poetry, in our sense; formerly it meant art, the activity of the productive reason, and in this sense it was discussed by Aristotle and Antiquity and by our own classical period. One might say that the word had gradually threaded its way through the body, so to say, of poetry and reached at last into its soul, to the point where it touches the spirit; so that from the metaphysician’s point of view the perspectives have altered with time. This is the natural outcome of the fact that poetry has only recently, in the poets at least, begun to reflect on itself explicitly and deliberately. The reflection, once begun, is endless.

An increasing consciousness of the self is one of the main laws governing human history, and it arises directly from the nature of spiritual activity. According to traditional philosophy the mind is characterised by its ability to make a complete return to itself; the essential thing being not the return, but the grasp or penetration of self by self which accompanies it. Reflexion is of the essence of the spirit; it grasps itself by itself and passes right through itself. Hence, in culture, the general importance of the phenomenon of becoming conscious.

Consider, dear child, the shame of wretches in love with wealth, who will not follow the lights that nature gives them to win the sovereign and everlasting Good. This was not beyond the pagan philosophers, who for love of knowledge cast riches from them; they saw them to be a hindrance. Yet the men I speak of wish to make riches their god, witness their greater grief to lose temporal wealth and substance than to lose me, the sovereign eternal riches. All manner of evil, if you but think a little, issues from this ungoverned will and desire for wealth.

Pride issues from it—the desire to be the greater; injustice to self and others; greed, which in lust for money rriakes no scruple to rob a brother or steal what belongs to Holy Church, bought though it is with the blood of my Son, my Word, my only-begotten. There issues also the trafficking in time and in neighbours’ flesh and blood (so with usurers, who sell like thieves what is not their own). Gluttony issues from it, with excess of foods and ungoverned eating; licentiousness too, for if a man had no wealth to spend, he would often not keep such sorry company. There are murders too; hatred and uncharitableness; cruelty; faithlessness towards me; and selfpresumption, as though it were thanks to themselves that men had wealth. Unperceiving that it is through me alone that they either get or keep it, they lose trust in me and trust only in it—idly, for it drops from them unawares, whether lost in this life by my provision and for their good, or whether lost at their death; thus they learn at length the hollowness and the fickleness of wealth.

Lille was at one time the capital of Flanders, and from the early Middle Ages has held an important place in both the religious and military history first of Flanders, then of France. In the early nineteenth century it became the centre of a great industrial area, largely due to its climate and to the coal and iron deposits in its neighbourhood. The nearest parallel that one can find in the rise of industrialism in England is Lancashire, and one may well call the department of the Nord, including as it does Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Fives, Bethune and Lens, the Lancashire of France.

Due to the efforts of a few industrialists and manufacturers, a beginning was made in 1874 with a Catholic University; subscriptions poured in, so that in 1875 the four faculties of law, science, letters and medicine were inaugurated. These, with a more recent addition of a faculty of theology, have remained the nucleus of the University, which is usually styled the Facultés Libres to distinguish it from the secular Facultds d’Etat. It is of interest that as early as 1897, following the lead of Oxford and Cambridge, University Extension lectures were established throughout the regions around the city. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of these was the annual Ecole Normale des dirigeants ouvriers chrétiens, which lasted a fortnight, was attended by the leaders of the Christian working class movements of the whole of the north of France and was addressed by professors from the Catholic University.

It was only natural that the University, set in the midst of an industrial area, should specialise in technical subjects; and there were founded successively an institute of higher industrial studies, and a school of industrial arts and crafts. Later came a department of Social Service and a school of Journalism.

St. Paul states the problem in all its poignancy : Hath God cast away His people? Are the Jews, the chosen ones, no longer the People of God? Paul himself was an Israelite of the seed of Abraham; this he could neither forget nor ever wish to repudiate; though he had ‘put on Christ,’ or rather perhaps because of that very fact, a ‘Hebrew of the Hebrews ‘he would always remain. No one could be more acutely aware than he that the coming to birth of the Christian Church appears a refutation by the facts of all the prophecies and the denial of the divine promises. ‘Jehovah had proclaimed himself a hundred times the liberator and saviour of his people : the Messiah was to be first of all the redeemer of the Jews; Sion was designated in advance as the centre of the Messianic theocracy and a bond of union with the unbelieving nations. But now, not only are the gentiles esntering the Church without first passing through the Synagogue, but they are almost the only ones who are entering, while the) Jews, whose rights seem preponderant, if not exclusive, find themselves shut out from it.’

In chapters ix and x St. Paul has been occupied with various aspects of the problem, first vindicating the justice and faithfulness of God (ix), than (x) touching on the concrete human situation which has given rise to it; in chapter xi he shows the providential reason for it and points the way to its solution.

The fact that Nazi Germany’s assault on Poland’s independence was the occasion of our declaring war, the bestial treatment of Polish citizens by the occupying'power, and a realization of the outrageous partitions of that country in the farther past have stirred the people of Great Britain to a determination that Poland shall be again restored and justice done in her regard. And In particular the enthusiasm (not unmixed with romanticism and a rather highly-coloured rhetoric) with which over years numerous Catholics have been foremost in upholding the Polish cause has brought to that cause an atmosphere of sacredness and mystique.

It is the more regrettable, therefore, that the people of Great Britain in general should have in certain respects an inadequate conception of the Polish situation : that they should (as so many of them do) imagine that the inhabitants of Poland are an almost entirely homogeneous people, one in culture, religion and history; that they should believe the difficulty about Eastern PoTand to be a straight issue between a united Poland on the one hand and the U.S.S.R. on the other.

Loisy died in 1940 and his devoted disciple, Miss Maud Petre, died in December', 1942. In the pages of this book she attempts to explain the Abba’s religious standpoint by copious citations from his writings, adding her own comments, verily those of a disciple. Just over forty years have elapsed since the publication of L'Evangile et l’Eglise took the ecclesiastical world by storm and, with its sequel Autour d’un petit livre, was condemned by the Holy See in 1903. Loisy declined to submit.

What a tragic story it is ! Nor is the telling of it by his devoted disciple less so. For while endeavouring to preserve her independence, she is plainly in full sympathy with the master’s main contentions. I have read her pages twice if not thrice, and—harsh though it may seem—the word ‘egoist,’ applicable to master and disciple alike, keeps recurring to the mind.

As Miss Petre herself says : ‘Loisy lived by mind rather than by heart, and mental agreement was, for him, essential to friendship.’ Hence the breach, first with Duchesne, then with von Hugel: ‘his Memoires testify to his sensitiveness and inability to endure contradiction patiently.’ Pius X, to whom Loisy had appealed, saw this clearly : ‘I have received a letter from Loisy; but while his appeal is addressed to my heart, his letter was not written from his own heart.’

To assert that modern verse is needlessly obscure is not to range oneself alongside those who regard Kipling and Mr. Masefield as the standard by which their successors should’ infallibly be judged. Nor is it to be in the (position of the dear old don who, in the early ’thirties, interviewed me for a scholarship, which I did not obtain, at one of the Oxford colleges.

Your answers have so far been fairly satisfactory,’ he said, ‘but have you read any modern poetry?’

The name Eliot’ was trembling on my lips, and would have been uttered had he not bereft me temporarily of speech by adding : Tennyson or Swinburne, for example?’

To come nearer home, I do not share myself the contempt for the poetry pf the ‘Georgians’ that is so fashionable to-day. Gibson, Brooke, Abercrombie, Drinkwater, de la Mare, Blunden, Davies and the rest wrote excellent simple verse on simple subjects. The poets of the ’thirties, and even more, the poets writing since the war, keep to simple subjects, often extremely naive subjects, but wrap them up in a modern, fashionable ‘poetic diction’ which they claim to have been invented by Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. This claim needs looking into.

The Marxist poets in Britain fell, of course, between two stools. They tried to equate an ingenuous code of politics with the expression in verse of the complexities of the modern world. Their needless obscurity was intended to cover up the confusions they inevitably ran into. They styled themselves the followers of Eliot, until the elder poet (in the comic words of John Strachey) ‘encouraged no doubt by the 1922-9 period of capitalist recovery, left the despair of the Waste Land behind him and took up the position of a highly intellectual reactionary.’ Thenceforward, Mr. Eliot was a ‘pedant,’ to borrow a diatribe from Louis MacNeice.

Translated into the terms of concrete human life and work, man’s answerableness in the divine image means free obedience to normative law. Such is the character of human obedience and the proximate definition of man's responsibility. All four of its terms are equally essential. Thus an unfree obedience, whether of ignorance or of force, is to that extent irresponsible, and a freedom which is not essentially qualified as obedience altogether lacks the condition of responsibility, for it is answerable to nothing. Again, an obedience, however free, which has nothing to do with law lacks an essential mark of human responsibility, namely order in and towards the common good. And although we may obey other laws, the character of the law that binds us precisely as responsible beings is to be normative. For a norm is the truth of things understood as a nature to be served and thus binds our will not arbitrarily but through our understanding.

We should recall, as Eric Gill was wont to recall ad nauseam, that man’s nature is twofold, bodily and spiritual (‘spirit and matter, both real and both good’) : that human life is the unity of these two elements which are resolved only by death and by false philosophy. But our death looks forward to the resurrection of our bodies. Thus our dependance upon the divine Image is also twofold. It shares the dependance of all created things upon their Exemplar as bodily creatures share it, being fashioned in a determinate scope of growth, of development and decay; and it obeys the laws of heaven as the grass of the field obeys them. But our dependance is also spiritual, of knowledge and of love.