It is three o'clock, Good Friday afternoon. Coaches and cars, cyclists and hikers, pour from the cities into the countryside; it is the first day of the holidays. Within the cities it is a nondescript sort of day; the shops, theatres, cinemas are closed, but (such at least are the mores of the British), there are crowds at the football grounds and the ‘dogs'.

There are unusually large crowds in the Catholic churches too. one wonders what has brought them. This is no day of ‘obligation’ ; absence from this service will bring no reproach and incur no guilt. Yet, besides the regular congregation, there are rows of unfamiliar faces; faces one seldom or never sees at Sunday Mass.

At this period of the year, as the earth swings in its orbit from aphelion to perihelion and brings the tree to bud and leaf again, Holy Church, by some ancient sortilege of Epacts and Indictions, Concurrences and Golden Numbers, fixes in that orbit a point that shall be Easter Day. Thereby she also fixes the days that immediately precede Easter. So nature and supernature, the universe and the universal Church, confront us year by year on Good Friday with that leafless and essential tree, the Cross.

Let us, today, go back to the first Good Friday, and take our stand where the Cross is to be erected. We are just outside the gates of Jerusalem, on the refuse-dump, the place of execution where the city eliminates its most hateful objects, the men whom it can no longer stomach within it. Look down from the little hill upon the great city.

Father Gerald Vann, o.p., in an article in a 1951 Blackfriars accused the modern world of flight into phantasy and counselled a return to reality. The Editor, in a later number, suggested forming some sort of Blackfriars Group, where questions so raised might be discussed in the light of what many of us are calling the Dominican Way. The Editor of The Life Of The spirit has been suggesting for some time that I should write something on diet, and especially fasting.

Can I, no philosopher, put all these three indications together and write on that one aspect of reality to which I give most of my study, nutrition?

We may phantasise a good deal about many practical matters and get away with it, but the fundamental things of nature pay a quick dividend, in good coin or bad, according to how we deal with their crude reality.

The fact that two great Carmelite saints should both have been called Teresa has inevitably led to a constant comparison between ‘the great’ and ‘the little’ saint, according to the various points of view of the critics. Miss Sackville-West compared them, in her study published eight years ago, as eagle and dove, with a strong bias in favour of the ‘eagle'. We naturally feel uneasy about such a valuation since they are both canonised saints and are therefore both great in the eyes of the Church. But perhaps there is some justification for such a comparison of value even for the Catholic who fully acknowledges the heroic greatness of both in the order of supernatural virtue.

The appearance at this time of several studies of the one and of the other St Teresa, together with the translated Letters of ‘Avila’ herself, gives us the occasion to weigh Miss Sackville-West's title once again.

The Holy Year, which, through no merit of Ours but by the mercy of God, has been productive of greater benefits than it was humanly possible to foretell, has, in a wonderful series of public manifestations, given evidence of the great faith and fullness of life in the Church of Christ, our Mother. Among these important events your congress, your brotherly meeting, appearing among them as a shining light, now comes to take its place; it gives Us pleasure to welcome you with words of affection.

Church history shows no parallel of a meeting like the one which has recently taken place whereat its members, chosen from among those who are resolved on the goal of evangelical perfection, met in this notable congress to discuss their common interests and take counsel together.