It is a truism that a controversialist should know and understand his opponent's point of view; but where relations with non-Catholics are concerned, it may well be that the time of controversy is over and that knowledge of others is now to be regarded rather as essential material for the rebuilding of a native Catholicism than as a weapon for attack and defence. The missionary practice of the Church has always been not to destroy a people's beliefs and practices but to correct, supplement and direct them to their true end; and this applies particularly to work amongst other Christians, where we speak from faith to faith. The non-Catholic Christian already believes in and follows our Lord, although his understanding of him is incomplete; it is our task to remove from his mind those misconceptions which hinder the full realization of the truth, making it possible for him to see the Catholic faith as the complete expression of that which he now holds imperfectly.

When our Lord Jesus Christ sat down to his last supper he did so, as he had done during all his earthly ministry, not as a host at a table of his very own, but as a guest in the house of another. He who could, had he wished, have turned stones into bread, was content to share the lot of those who have passed beyond being able to help themselves, and who enrich the lives of others by receiving from them. He did this for our instruction. Giving and receiving is a reciprocal action. In that act of humility whereby he, the master, washed his disciples’ feet, he set forth in a final and unmistakable fashion what he had previously been teaching: that his disciples were to love one another as he had loved them, stooping to each other's lowliest needs, cherishing each other with a really personal devotion. In this way they would always find him with them.

The true apostle must be a poet, and an apostle who is not a poet is no true apostle.

In order to understand this claim, we may start by describing the would-be apostle who is no apostle. A Christian sets out to be an apostle for Christ. He joins a Catholic Action group or enters an Order such as that of the Dominicans who specialize in preaching. He begins to prepare himself for the work by reaching down from the shelves of the library large tomes of Christian doctrine and theology. He learns all that the Church commonly teaches; he delves into St Thomas's deep and precise explanations. Better still, he may con the gospels to discover what Christ himself taught. He will study, too, maybe in a course of apologetics, all the reasons against the faith that are likely to be brought up against him in his missionary activity, and he will discover, not merely ‘the answers’ as though every problem he met could be answered by his own wit, but, sensibly, he will discover the lines along which such attacks can be met and parried.

One of the marks of the living Church is its ability to inspire leaders in every age especially fitted to meet the needs of the age. Never has there been a time when the spiritual soil was so infertile that it was unable to produce valiant men and women to answer the challenge of the world. In the past there was a St Dominic, a St Francis, a St Teresa. In later centuries there were names like Pernet and Hecker and Rice. And these are but a few of the thousands from the time of St Paul to our own day raised by God as leaders in their own particular day and hour.

Against this background of inspired leadership we are inclined to think that our own age, especially the years since the end of the first world war, are barren indeed. We see only spiritual aridity, the noxious weed of materialism run riot.

This little book1 makes known for the first time to English readers the noly and hidden life of a German Ursuline nun who died in the odour of sanctity in 1918, at the age of thirty-five.

The story is a beautifully simple one. Sister Blandine was born in the saar district in 1883, the daughter of a farmer. She became a qualified teacher and taught in a little village school, until at the age of twentyfive she entered the Ursuline Novitiate at Calvarienberg near Ahrweiler in the Rhineland. In 1911, after taking her first vows, she was sent to Saarbrücken to resume teaching. Within a few weeks, however, illness caused her to be moved to lighter work at the convent at Trier. Here she remained, occupied in the school, until her last illness confined her to her room in 1916. She was bedridden for eighteen months, and died on May 18th, 1918.

If, in order to remain truly religious, any adaptation must leave untouched the essence of the vows of obedience, and of poverty, it is even more evident that it must not touch the essence of the vow of virginity. One day I was reading various passages from the Directory of the ancelles to a Benedictine nun. The paragraph concerning obedience began with these words. ‘Fundamentally it is obedience which makes nuns of you.’ She exclaimed: ‘Oh, no, indeed! If I am a nun it is before all because I am a consecrated virgin!’ I think that as a matter of fact she was right. Of the three vows one can say that in substance virginity is, by all that it offers and expresses, the most characteristic of a religious. consecration. Perhaps we shall come back to this. In any case it clear that there can be no toning down in the practice of chastity. Consecration to God is an absolute.

However, in this sphere as with the others a certain adaptation is noteworthy. It lies either in the teaching of the vow of chastity or in the traditional ascetism organized with a view to its preservation.

The things I am going to write about are very ordinary; the framework of my life is very like that of millions of other women. A lot of people think it is dull, and so it might be except that the very dullness of it is a means of grace, and therefore no longer dull. So this is all I can write about— some of the ordinary events, thoughts, problems, prayers of an ordinary day; one of those days which seem so monotonous from outside, but into each of which is poured all the riches of God's grace, if only I have eyes clear enough to see it and a heart brave enough to accept it.

You who fear God and hold the Faith should be of a ready spirit for all things. Though your portion be the loss of wealth, or this unceasing ravage and agony of disease; though your wife be taken from you, or your children or your friends, yet shall such pain, such separation and such gloom be unto you not an offence but a combat. Let them not break your faith, O Christian, but shew forth your valour in the struggle, since the hurt of present ills shall be taken lightly in the confidence of the good things to come. When victory is attained, the crown is won; but without combat there can be no conquest. For the pilot is discerned in the storm, and the soldier proved in the field: and a trial of endurance is no trial when there is no danger, the combat real only when the foe is real.

The unspoken comment of many of us as we read or hear a parable from the Gospels is ‘This is ideal and good; but very unpractical'. It certainly does not seem to fit in with the world as we know it; our twentieth-century, fast-moving’ commercial world would seem an unsympathetic place for the practice of the Christian virtues. I think the truth really is however that it is all too practical, and in our more sincere moments we know that it is only the Christian virtue which is found in the most unlikely places, which keeps the world in existence at all.

The story of the Good Samaritan is of course a story made up to point a moral: it has its deliberate artistic exaggeration. To begin with our Lord chooses a Samaritan as the hero of his story, because the Samaritans were in the eyes of the Jews highly unpopular neighbours.

How was it that Moses, who had seen God in so many visions and to whom he had spoken ‘as man is wont to speak to his friend’, should now ask God to reveal himself as though these former theophanies, which we believe on the authority of the scriptures, had never been? Has he who showed himself over and again really not yet appeared to Moses? And yet the divine voice does now in some sort grant this prayer, not denying this grace, yet dashing Moses’s hopes again by explaining that the desire of his heart is beyond the capacity of mortal man. But God also says that there is ‘a place’ near him, and in this place ‘a rock’, and ‘a cleft’ within the rock where he bids Moses go. There God’s right hand will protect the face of his servant while Hepasses, and when he has gone by, Moses shall see his back. Thus Moses will believe he has seen God who is the goal of his desire, and the promise of the divine voice shall not be void.

The relationship between the clergy and the laity is one of the touchstones of the health of the Church. This relationship varies from age to age and from country to country. The subject is a delicate one, but without desiring to arouse controversy, it is worth looking at a few of the factors involved.

Father Plé has honoured me with the formidable responsibility of replacing him during this course of study. It is certainly not because of my ordinary work, for I am a professor of philosophy, and, which might seem even worse, professor of scholastic philosophy! That seems sufficiently remote from directing souls, or from canon law! The only qualification I have for speaking here is my collaboration in the organization and the work of the ancelles—that is to say, that part of the active branch of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion concerned with an up-to-date apostolate.

The circumstances of life in any country, its history and the racial characteristics of its people all influence, to a greater or a lesser degree, that country's literature, including its theology. The last twenty-five years have seen a change in the atmosphere in which English Catholicity in all its branches has to live, work and develop. Religious controversy still exists, but it is less important now than it was, let us say, fifty years ago. Catholic activity is increasing and there is a marked interest in all the problems relating to the spiritual life.

However, since the English character is essentially practical in its outlook, the study of spiritual theology—to include under that term both ascetical and mystical theology—tends to be mainly directed towards the practical problems of everyday life. The study of spirituality in England tends to restrict itself to the translation of the works of the great mystics, both at home and abroad, and to the divulgation or popularization of those doctrines which have most application to the Pr actice of religion.

Several articles have appeared recently in English publications about Padre Pio, the Italian Franciscan friar who for the last thirty-four years has borne ‘stigmata’ in hands and feet and side, resembling the traditional wounds of our Lord on the Cross.

Stigmata—in these days the word itself is apt to cause some raising of scientific eyebrows; it conjures up pictures of hysterical and neurotic girls inflicting wounds on themselves so as to be thought holy. Pious folk are too often over-credulous; and another instance, also in a person living today, has been under much discussion. It is necessary, therefore, to get at the facts.

Others have written of Padre Pio's life in its setting, of his extraordinary influence over the crowds who flock to S. Giovanni Rotondo to see him, of his apostolate of the confessional, of the village, almost, that has sprung up round his monastery, and the big modern hospital, now almost completed, that has been built through his inspiration and encouragement.

Many Catholics feel increasingly disturbed in their faith nowadays by the anthropological approach to religion. Anthropologists currently look upon religion as just one of the aspects of 'culture', as a psychological objectivation of man's subjective emotions, imaginations and explanations of reality. Gods, spirits, myths are therefore just as man-made, as are human institutions, customs, morals, say they.

May I suggest that in this, as in all other cases of disbelief and misbelief, it is quite wrong on our part (and not only tactically inexpedient) to throw the offered opinion into the waste-paper basket as totally unacceptable. We used to do so with Paganism and have only of late come to sec that Pagan beliefs are partial truths that need straightening out and being put in the proper perspective—truths which, when thus treated, enrich our own understanding by an emphasis on facts that often have hitherto escaped us.

When therefore we are told that man makes his god, I would accept this statement as quite true, as far as it goes, but add that unfortunately it does not go far enough. Does every puddle in the road make its own sun? Yes and no—poetically yes, scientifically no.

In guiding ourselves in the way of our Blessed Lord, we have to a certain extent to be left to our own conscience and we can't put on to the shoulders of any one else the decision. Obedience settles much in religion, but there must always be a Margin over ‘when?'. A number of tilings in the spiritual life are left to our own judgment, decision and prudence, details outside obedience, where authority may not or cannot enter. A vast region lies under our own rule. To guide this we have a Acuity that goes by the name of conscience. It is not the voice of God, not like God whispering; it is a moral faculty. We have born in us the musical faculty. Now that is part of us, it can be trained well or ill, made to choose that which is best in music or less good; also the faculty of speech, we can speak well or ill, pronounce our words well or not. Just such a faculty is our conscience, the power of selecting what is good or what is ill.