Commenting on two famous medieval encyclopedias, the Liber Floridus of Lambert of Saint Omer, and the Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg, Carl Nordenfalk observes how these authors ‘combine a broad universal vision with a special interest in their home surroundings’. In Herrad's case this is certainly most striking. Her vision could hardly be broader (it is even comparable to Saint Hildegard's), yet the picture which she paints of Hohenburg, the shrine of St Odile where she was abbess, leaves no doubt about the central point of her vast twelth-century universe. The monastery stands on a green mound, without perspective, decorated by three enlarged sprigs of clubmoss for trees. The nuns are grouped in a harmonious ensemble of purple, green, blue and black gowns, with brown cloaks. The congregatio religiosa ... in dei servido in Hohenburc caritative adunata, is Herrad's first preoccupation, and if, for caritative, we are meant to read cantative, as one authority suggests, the picture is even more charming.

At the annual general meeting of the Vernacular Society of Great Britain in April this year, it was decided that a memorandum of evidence, concerning the use of English and Latin in the liturgy, should be prepared by the executive committee and submitted to the preparatory commission for the sacred liturgy of the Second General Council of the Vatican. The recommendations put forward in this memorandum have provoked no small measure of interest among Catholics and non Catholics alike, having been reported widely in the press at home and abroad, notably here in The Times, Guardian, and Daily Telegraph. They were welcomed in the religious press from the Universe to the British Weekly. I have a two-fold purpose in discussing them now: to explain something of the principles by which the committee were guided in formulating their recommendations, and to place the much discussed problem of liturgical language in the new perspective created by the approach of a general council of the Church.

In order to talk theologically about sex, we have to look at the place which sex has in the divine plan, in the revelation of God. It might be imagined that we could explain what God has revealed to us about sex so that we could compare or contrast it with what Freud or D. H. Lawrence or Dr Kinsey has to say about sex. But this would not be quite accurate: what we want to discover is not what God says about sex, but what sex as interpreted by the Old Testament, by Christ and by the sacraments, has to show us about God.

We may begin with a poem which has been inserted at the very beginning of the Bible. Its opening lines give us the theme of the poem ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ It is to be a poem about what creation means.

Fr Bouyer is never superficial, but it is a pity that his profound thought should not be expressed with more clarity and economy. This is particularly true of'an essay on the place of the Virgin Mary in Christian theology and its significance for humanity,' since a subject of such maystery and delicacy suffers in its impact on the reader from a very analytical and somewhat heavy and repetitive treatment. Nevertheless the basic thought of this book is of great value, particularly at this time when much attention is necessarily given to the subject of sexuality. Fr Bouyer faces questions which arise in many minds and, in the light of the scriptural exegesis of the early church and of the gospel account of the place of our Lady in the work of redemption, he strives to provide answers on the subjects of sex, virginity, marriage and the family as seen in the light of revelation.

Being at Spode brings to my mind recollections of Fr Austin Barker, who often came to lecture to us on social questions, and also gave us a very beautiful retreat. He was very dramatic and highly entertaining, and his name always brings to mind certain phrases, such as: “Watch it, sisters; watch it very carefully!’ I always remember hearing him speak about the children's mass on Sunday. He described it thus: ‘Rows and rows of children—tall figure at the end—rows and rows of children all squashed together—tall figure at the end, booming out instructions, and directions and prayers—My dear sisters', he would say appalled, and holding his head in his hand, ‘the divine sacrifice of the mass'.

Well, we all long to make this divine sacrifice real to the children— we would love to make them want to go to mass—we would all like to be able to say with Cardinal Newman, ‘I could hear masses for ever and not be tired'.

The Lamentations of Jeremiah is a book with which the old Tenebree Office for Holy Week gave many people at least a nodding acquaintance. Not infrequently, however, the much admired musical settings tended to detract from the attention given to the words themselves, a fact noticed by Mendelssohn, who remarked that the most powerful music was usually expended on the mere rubrics, the alephs beths, and incipits. That Lamentations does repay, both for theological and for literary content, a careful study, will I hope emerge from this article. But before we speak of content, we should say a word or two about the structure and authorship of the book.

The book consists of five poems, corresponding to its five chapters of which the first four are abecedarian in structure (which is to say that each stanza begins with a fresh letter of the Hebrew alphabet and each line of the stanza begins with the same letter as the first line)

It is a pleasure to welcome the appearance in English of a work of deep theological relevance. Dr von Rad's commentary was published in the German Protestant series, Das Alte Testament Deutsch, nearly a decade ago. Now that it is available in English, it is to be hoped that it will be widely read. If so, the result can only be a growth in our understanding of the developing relationship between man and his creator, who has revealed himself in scripture as the Lord of history. Let us be clear that this commentary on Genesis is not primarily aimed at the expert philologist or literary critic. Von Rad accepts the classical documentary theory in general, and he devotes a minimum of space in this book to discussing the sources of particular passages. In this he is at the other extrerne to Martin Noth in his commentary on Exodus in the same Series (scheduled to appear in English also in the Old Testament library), which is devoted very largely to source criticism.

The traditions about the birth of St John the Baptist enshrined in St Luke's gospel would appear to have come from a Hebrew source, and they correspond to a literary type, we might almost say a theme, which recurs in the Old Testament. John, or ‘the Lord gives grace’ was a child of divine promise, born of aged parents against all expectation. The scriptures had already told how Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah, and told too of how an angel appeared to announce the birth of Samson. Whereupon Samuel was born in answer to prayer, to put an end to a would-be mother's anguish, and above all to be a prophet in the great designs of God. Jeremiah, we read, was sanctified from his mother's womb. All this, and more, in the scriptures prepared for, and pointed to, the precursor and herald of the saviour.

It is generaly admitted that far too many modern books on prayer and The spiritual life are of little value. Such books often enough claim to belong to the tradition of the Church, depending upon and being continuous with the great figures of the past such as St Bernard and St John of the Cross, but in fact this dependence is merely superficial, there being a fundamental break in a process of transmission which must be essentially organic, with its roots in the past and its life in the present—that surely is the significance of tradition.

To claim that our thought about the nature of prayer should be up to date is not to claim that it should dissociate itself from the past—far from it. The very nature of Christian speculation is that it must give full value to and appreciate language and thought-form in which the Church has given expression to her consciousness of the life of Christ within her throughout her history and particularly as witnessed to by the great patristic figures and doctors of the Church.

Fontevrault is not one of the compelling architectural landmarks of the Val de Loire, Saint-Benoît or Cunault. It is just apeaceful, rambling old place that one visits because its splendid name and all its connotations have a fascination of their own. The English remember that Henry II and Richard, Queen Eleanor and King John's wife were buried There, whil the French will remind you that Bertrade de Montfort, the mistress of Philip I, took the veil there and died of her austerities. But beside its well known connections with royal families, there is the attractive contradiction of Fontevrault having housed women of quite another StamP—lepers, prostitutes, and social outcasts of various kinds. That contradiction is sufficient to convince us that a really original and Christ-like mind must have been at work in this place.

Within the abbey, a first impression is of size and splendour and fine Materials. The elaborate kitchen gives an idea of the numbers involved In the institution.

‘The most significant factor of the last one hundred and fifty years is the urbanisation of the world’ said Fr Houtart, Secretary of the International Centre for Research in Religious Sociology. Addressing the members of the International Catechetical Year at Lumen Vitae, he compared the revolution caused in society by this phenomenon to the barbarian invasions of the fourth century, which changed the face of the world as it was then known. This signifies, he said, far more than an increased density of population in the cities; it is a real transformation of social life. M. Labbens, President of this Society, also speaking during this course of lectures in religious sociology, went so far as to assert that ‘The world is about to give birth to a new civilisation'.

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.

One of the recurrent objections to Christianity, from the time when, as St John records, many disciples forsook our Lord because he said he would give us his flesh to eat, is that it is materialist, and the objectors wish the materialistic lumps could be strained out of the soup, which would then be a pure nourishment, suited to the most delicate digestion. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Christianity is not a mass of facts from which we can pick what we like and reject the rest, but an organic whole, and that truth is bound to present some difficulties to human minds, it may be worth considering what revelation has to tell us about matter.

Obviously to material beings such as ourselves the subject is meaningful. he world confronts us as a reality: so does our own flesh.

If so many modern forms of apostolate require their members to make an annual retreat, or even a monthly day of recollection, I am inclined to think it is far less a case of their organizers including something from the familiar Catholic stock-in-trade than one of needing to satisfy a real want. It really is an impressive feature of the twentieth-century apostolate and goes a long way to prove its authenticity. As long as apostles—actionists—realize they have nothing to give without first finding it in prayer and seclusion we can trust their work to be truly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The first rousers of conscience among the Catholics of France and Belgim were the Abbé Cardijn and later the Abbé Godin, creating The Young Christian Workers to redeem an entire class; not a remote dusky jungle-dwelling race, but a nation of neighbours, living in the closed World of factories and workshops, who had become alienated from the Church.

Many of the simplest phrases in St John's gospel have an arresting character and may powerfully urge us to turn them over and over in mind. ‘The disciple whom Jesus loved’ (Jn 21. 20) is one such which calls for further thought, and which may well help us to pray. This disciple is first explicitly referred to at the last supper

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.