‘Soul’ has come to be almost exclusively a religious word in modern languages, like ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ and ‘prayer’. The soul is something which people beheve in or do not believe in, like God. It is thought of as an important but highly mysterious part of a human being, which it is the aim of the Christian religion to save. We talk about the salvation of souls, but not of bodies or minds or even of people, because ‘bodies’, ‘minds', and ‘people’ are profane every-day concepts shared by believers and unbelievers alike. No one would dream of saying they believed or did not beheve in the body, the mind, or people, because they are all more or less evident phenomena of which we all have experience. Soul is not an evident phenomenon, but a mysterious hypothesis which rehgious people believe in and others often do not.

Treatises of old testament theology never fail to remind us that ruach, the Hebrew word for ‘spirit', also means ‘wind’ or ‘breath'. Of these three meanings, that of wind appears to have been the most primitive. One can see how natural it is to think of the wind as an act of God. Invisible, immensely powerful and sometimes catastrophic in its effects, it is also of mysterious origin, transcendant and quite uncircurnscribed in its activity. This ‘wind symbolism', primitive though it is, is of permanent theological value. It is to be found in the late and developed theology of Ecclesiastes. ‘Going southwards, turning about northwards, about and about goes the wind’ (i, 6) ‘ … you know not what the way of the wind is’ (xi, 5). In the new testament it is taken up in the teaching of our Lord himself.

IN 1311 it was decreed at the Council of Vienne, in the south of France, that ‘whoever obstinately presumes to assert, defend, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not of itself and essentially the form of the human body, is to be classed as a heretic'.

The nature of the soul is properly speaking a matter of philosophical enquiry. But it is clearly a matter which touches Christian Faith very closely. There have been and there are all sorts of Philosophical opinions about the soul and human nature which would make the Christian gospel of salvation quite meaningless; which the Church therefore does not hesitate to condemn. Nowadays one would think immediately of any form of materialism which does not allow for the immortality of the soul.

But in this condemnation the Council of Vienne was concerned With the opposite kind of error, which could well be called spititualist, and would in effect deny the body its proper place in the scheme of salvation.

‘What is the use of life and health if we cannot throw them away for so great a King and Lord?’ asked St Teresa of Avila, and her words could stand as a kind of headline for the life of Edel Quinn, whose cause for beatification has lately been introduced. For it was a woman fighting a losing battle against tuberculosis who blazed the Legion of Mary’s trail over much of Africa. Yet you could meet Edel and not notice anything particular about her, a Dublin typist going to daily mass, spending her free time for the legion; there are thousands more hke that. And this gives special interest to her beatification cause; that she was so much of the ordinary stream of Irish Catholicism and achieved such extraordinary results makes her appear a kind of patron and pace setter for the contemporary lay apostolate.

Edel Quinn was born in Kanturk, Co. Cork, on September Hth, 1907.

YOU have just been reborn of water and the spirit—that is why you are called infants—and so you look at this food and drink on this table of the Lord's in an altogether new light, and regard it with fresh feelings of love and reverence. And now the duty of preaching a sermon, and the care I have spent in giving birth to you so that Christ might be formed m you, compels me to explain to you what it means, what it is about—this great and divine sacrament, this noble and superlative medicine, this clean and simple sacrifice, which is now offered, no longer in just one city, the earthly Jerusalem, nor in the tabernacle which Moses or the temple which Solomon constructed (these were just shadows of things to come); no, now it is sacrificed from ‘the rising of the sun to its setting’ as the prophets foretold, and it is offered to God as a victim of praise according to the grace of the new covenant.