The term ‘mystical body’ is a curious one, curious, that is, in. the sense That very few ordinary Catholics make very much of it as an important Element in their lives. They are members of it, they know the name, But thinking of it as something real in the sense that our Lord or our Lady are real to them is very rare; this is Partly due, I think, to the debasernent of the word ‘mystical', and partly due to historical circumstances. For so long it has been fashionable to think of Christianity as an affair of regulating our own spiritual lives that we have hardly given The idea of the community of Christians a thought. Now that ‘mystical Body’ is a term heard on all sides, there is a consciousness that it is Somehow important, but little idea how it is to be integrated into our daily lives.

‘Parsons are all liars’. This was the opinion of a sergeant in a military training establishment who taught me how to ride a motor bicycle, long before I ever dreamt I would enter the parsonic ranks myself, The sergeant spoke in praise, not blame. For it was also his duty to instruct cadets in the art of expounding the mechanisms of the objects they rode, and it was his view that if parsons could speak fluently for forty minutes on stuff they could not possibly prove—and that was what he meant by saying they were liars—then cadets ought to be able to speak for five minutes, in the classical military ‘lecturette’, on the hard facts of the internal combustion engine.

‘Holiness’ seems to be the term we would choose in preference to any other to denote moral perfection in its highest and most general form; a holy man is one distinguished by the practice of outstanding virtue.

For this reason it is important to note that in the Bible holiness is not used primarily of men at all, but of God; and in God it is not first of all a moral quality so much as a quality of his being. (This is not to say that Israel's idea of God was ever divorced from morality, or that the Bible was ever concerned with a philosophical definition of God like the Greek First Cause. That, I hope, will become clear in what follows. But it does mean that the Bible is not so anxiously concerned with morality, especially human morality, as we are inclined to be).

Come over here, Secunda! Ma-the-lawyer's son wants to take a photo of everyone'—it was Prima at my elbow. Of everyone present? That seemed to me optimistic. The old Japanese-style house we occupy in Taipei, capital of Taiwan, is not large, even when we take down the sliding paper-covered doors and make a single room of it; but that afternoon, after the ceremony at the church nearby, the one room was certainly crowded. As we are a team of four Auxiliaries each working in a different profession we have a variety of friends and acquaintances. Nearly all the people in the room were Chinese—natives of Taiwan itself and of all parts of the mainland—and for the photo we were gathering round our own Chinese bishop, Mgr Cheng, consecrated a few months earlier.

It is a pity we know so little about a holy man with such a quaint name as Pambo, commemorated on July 18. Pambo strikes a frolicsome note among the renowned and dignified names of the Fathers of the Desert with whom he worked: Antony, Palladius, Isidore, Macarius. It may be that the sound reminds us of Jumbo or Sambo and if so the sooner we stop our ears to this skittish euphony the better. Pambo was by no means reminiscent of the nursery.

He was born round about the year 315, of whom and why he was called Pambo there is no record, but he became one of the founders of the Nitrian monasteries in the Egyptian desert and in his youth a disciple of St Antony. His life was the same as that of all the monks of the Thebaid, with severe fasts, long hours of prayer and the inevitable mat-making.