I remember a secular priest, in the course of a retreat at Oxford a good many years ago, politely chiding us Dominicans for not making more of St Catherine of Siena. The rebuke was, and is, worth attending to. St Catherine is always rated among the greatest figures in Dominican history, and there are those who would place her among the greatest women of all time. Yet it is now eighty years since the first, and last, really solid work on her life and teaching by an English Dominican—a nun, as it happened—appeared: the massive biography by Augusta Theodosia Drane, a very good work for its time and one unduly neglected. Since then there have been four books in English worth mentioning here: the two ‘Lives’ by Edmund Gardner and Alice Curtayne, the translation of the Dialogue by Algar Thorold, and vida Scudder's version of a selection of the Letters.

Practically from the very start of the Society of Jesus there has been a certain stern picture painted of Jesuits. We read about the ‘cunning, crafty’ Jesuits; the ‘intellectual, unemotional’ followers of St Ignatius, pascal calls them ‘people who do not keep their word, without faith, without honour, without truth, deceitful in heart, deceitful in speech', and then in one of the more recent common evaluations Time magazine (September 16, 1957) stylizes the Society as a calculating, and, in every sense, a cold military organization. These opinions on the spirit of the society of Jesus have one thread of common unity: the Jesuit is a stoic statue impervious to ordinary human emotions and feelings. He is calculating and reasoning; the intellect has smothered the heart. His two daily examinations of conscience, the varied ‘experiments’ to test his abilities and his control, the introspective, personal evaluations, all these have allowed him to gain mastery over his human nature; a mastery that somehow removes the human and leaves just the nature.

The salutary worth of Christ's death, as we have said, does not lie in the mere biological disintegration of a man who was at the same time God, but rather in the obedient love through which Christ sacrificed himself in absolute attachment to God. Death objectively and factually implies the abandoning of all; a thorough rooting out and dispossessing of self, a passive being-shut-off from without, a loss of proprietary right to self. Death takes everything from us. This precisely is the nature of death as a punishment for sin.

Death is something that happens to us; in itself dying is not an Action done by man, let alone the greatest action he does: it is something which overcomes us. Death can therefore only have a positive, Christian and salutary significance when we freely accept this alienation from self, which is a fact, as a positively desired detachment from self for the love of God in union with the dying Christ.