As is evident in her first published article ‘I am Sadly Theoretical: It is the Effect of Being at Oxford’, Elizabeth Anscombe's passion as an undergraduate is to give Christian witness to her society. As an ‘under 25,’ Anscombe takes up the Catholic Herald's general invitation to express her Catholic views and the life she intends to live. While other contributors share their dreams of becoming journalists, farmers, nurses, etc., Anscombe's ambition is of a different order. She ‘chiefly wants all who are outside the Church to become Catholic, and all Catholics, saints’. In what she considers to be a generation immunized against the preached or printed word, Anscombe proposes to witness to her world by embodying ‘the Catholic social scheme’. In young Anscombe's view, only the failure of regular Catholics to live their faith in the marketplace prevents England's wholesale conversion to Catholicism. She summarizes her calling: ‘We must be the first … to deal justly, suppress usury, underselling, unjust prices and wages, to respect and increase the human dignity of the poor by restoring to them greater control over their own lives’.
In this issue marking the 800th anniversary of the Dominican friars in England, my task is to examine the Dominican influences on Anscombe as an undergraduate at Oxford (1937-1941). Although she left few reminiscences of those days, since Anscombe rightly teaches us that a person's intentions are typically shown by her actions, we can discern a number of key influences, in particular that of three Catholic ‘societies’. For example, in her ‘I am Sadly Theoretical’ article, we see the influence of the Catholic Social Guild (CSG).Footnote 1 In her other undergraduate publication, The Justice of the Present War Examined, co-authored with fellow undergraduate Norman Daniel, we see the influence of the PAX Society, whose views she and Daniel faithfully represented in their pamphlet.Footnote 2 However, the society that influenced Anscombe most was the Blackfriars Dominicans. This essay focuses on the Thomists who formally instructed Anscombe and how one Dominican, Victor White, likely instructed her on a radical Catholic perspective on the morality of war, which would be reflected in The Justice of the Present War Examined.
Dominican influences on Anscombe began upon her arrival at Oxford in October of 1937. First, Anscombe sought instruction from the Dominicans with a view to being received into the Catholic Church. Second, shortly after arriving at Oxford, Anscombe and her new group of friends, ‘almost all Catholic or about to become Catholics … centred on Blackfriars – the Oxford Dominicans’.Footnote 3 Third, in addition to her undergraduate social life revolving around Blackfriars, a Dominican (or Thomist) outlook was conveyed by three individuals who formally instructed Anscombe: Dominican Fr. Richard Kehoe; Dominican Fr. Victor White, and the Thomist philosopher Donald MacKinnon.Footnote 4 Of those three, I shall argue that Victor White OP exercised the greatest influence on Anscombe during her undergraduate years.
Fr. Richard Kehoe OP (1905-1981), a young and charismatic American-born Dominican, was assigned to ‘instruct’ Anscombe during her first undergraduate year, leading up to her coming into full Communion with the Catholic Church in April of 1938.Footnote 5 Kehoe was evidently a good apologist, as he was the most popular Catholic speaker in the earliest years of the Oxford Socratic Club.Footnote 6 Kehoe attended the Dominican school at Hawkesyard as a youth, joining the Dominicans at the age of 16. After his initial training, Kehoe was sent to the Angelicum in Rome and to the École Biblique in Jerusalem to train as a Scripture scholar. Kehoe returned from his studies in 1933, and was barely 30 when in 1935 he was appointed lector (professor) in Scripture at Blackfriars.Footnote 7 His methods of Scriptural interpretation were heavily literary, and somewhat avant-garde, and would influence the teaching of Scripture at Blackfriars long after Kehoe stopped teaching there in 1947.Footnote 8 While we do not know the details of Kehoe's spiritual influence on Anscombe, her concern and affection for him were clear over the years when she heard about his troubles (Kehoe left the Dominican Order), and upon hearing of his death.Footnote 9
Besides being Anscombe's spiritual guide into the Catholic Church in 1937–1938, Kehoe was best friends with another young lector (professor) at the Blackfriars studium, the brilliant and maverick Thomist theologian, Victor White.Footnote 10 Kehoe almost surely spoke to White about Anscombe, because Victor White, a man who lived for ideas, was a perfect match for the spiritually and intellectually intense Anscombe.Footnote 11
The year after being instructed by Kehoe, Anscombe took the highly unusual step of requesting tutorial instruction from a Dominican friar, namely, Fr. Victor White, OP (1902–1960). Despite the fact that this kind of thing was ‘not done’, Anscombe somehow got permission, as presumably did White.Footnote 12 In recruiting White to be her tutor, Anscombe secured the most innovative interpreter of Thomas at Blackfriars.Footnote 13 But White was more than that, as he was also Blackfriars’ expert on what Anscombe called the ‘Catholic social scheme’, i.e. the Catholic social and political thought of the day. In addition, White was Oxford's foremost exponent of the Pax Society viewpoint on the morality of war.Footnote 14 To understand how White came to possess his unique set of qualities, and why his tutoring Anscombe was so extraordinary, it is necessary to provide background both on White and on Anscombe's degree programme.
Victor White OP: Thomist, Theo-political Theorist, ‘Paxist’Footnote 15
In the 1930s Victor White was not only an intellectual giant at Blackfriars, he was somewhat of a theological auto-didact. Compared to many of the other lectors, White had relatively little advanced theological education. Completing his basic philosophy and theology training in 1928 and duly ordained, Dominican Provincial, Bede Jarrett, had to make a decision about White's future. This came at a providential moment in the history of the English Dominicans. The Dominican studium was moving from Hawkesyard to Oxford the next year, the culmination of Jarrett's grand (and at times controversial) vision for the future of the English Dominican Province. A historian of the social and political vision of the Dominican Order, especially as embodied in its Constitutions, Jarrett wanted lectors at the new studium who could and would present a culturally-relevant Thomism. As Weldon puts it,
Jarrett, eager to bring the philosophical and theological tradition of Aquinas to the concerns of the day, wanted the Dominican community to engage with contemporary scholarship at the university. Accordingly, he appointed lectors who believed that Aquinas was not to be taught by manuals, but rooted in history, art, philosophy, psychology, literature, and culture.Footnote 16
Although the term had not yet been invented, we might say that Jarrett was looking for something approximating a ressourcement Thomist, who by understanding Aquinas in light of his own history and culture, could appropriately apply Aquinas’ teaching to contemporary culture. In White, Jarrett had found a Thomist theologian who was at least groping in that direction.
There's good reason to think that in a 25 year-old Victor White, Jarrett saw a protégé. For White shared Jarrett's (and Vincent McNabb's) desire to see social and political questions through a Dominican lens, and their fascination with Dominican tertiary Eric Gill's Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin, and Pigott's Communities. By the early 1930s, White had befriended both Eric Gill and the Dominican tertiary Donald Attwater, a writer and editor associated with Gill.Footnote 17 White's friendships with them would lead to fruitful collaborations in the late 1930s, when both Attwater and Gill would serve as President of the PAX Society.
Regardless of whether ‘protégé’ is the best description of their relationship, Jarrett recognized White's scholarly gifts, and presented him with opportunities to use them. Having determined that White would be a lector when the Oxford studium opened the following year, Jarrett sent White to Louvain to obtain a licentiate.Footnote 18 Returning in less than a year, White attended the Oxford studium's inauguration, and in 1930, at age 27, he began as a lector in dogmatic theology.Footnote 19
In January of 1934, Jarrett presented White with a second important opportunity to exercise his intellectual gifts. From December of 1932 until March of 1934, Jarrett was editor of Blackfriars. Consonant with Jarrett's vision for the studium, he wanted to return Blackfriars to its original mission, which was not to ‘entertain or necessarily edify its readers’, but to ‘try to tell relevant truths and insist on those truths that are either unknown or neglected or in danger of being forgotten’.Footnote 20 In large part, this would be to return to a focus on social questions, moving it ‘quite decisively away from the predominantly literary, not to say somewhat precious and belles-lettres review it was in the later 1920s, to discuss the “social and economic ills” that afflicted Britain and the wider world, in the light of the teaching of Pope Pius XI’.Footnote 21 After a year's effort to transform Blackfriars, with Thomas Gilby as assistant editor, Jarrett was generally pleased with the results, but he apologized that the ‘new’ Blackfriars at times suffered from ‘overfrankness of expression’.Footnote 22 Such overfrankness by one of the Dominicans had already led to troubleFootnote 23, and it seems that Jarrett's solution, although he did not publicly indicate it, was to add a second pseudonymous column.Footnote 24 The new columnist was ‘Penguin’ (aka Victor White), whose ‘Extracts and Comments’Footnote 25 would appear in Blackfriars every month from January 1934 to September 1939. During those six years White – either under his own name or as ‘Penguin’ – had at least 130 discrete publications in Blackfriars.Footnote 26 From 1937 to 1939, White's contributions to Blackfriars averaged more than two pieces a month.
In 1935 Gilby departed Oxford for London,Footnote 27 and White became assistant editor of Blackfriars under Hilary Carpenter, who had succeeded Jarrett as editor.Footnote 28 While Carpenter initially contributed monthly editorials, this ceased in early 1937, with the ethos of Blackfriars already evolving. From 1936 onwards, Blackfriars was filled with articles on political ideologies, conflicts arising from them, and the morality of war conflicts, e.g. communism and fascism, Italy and Abyssinia, the Spanish civil war, and the rise of Hitlerism. In contrast to most of the English Catholic press, Blackfriars included a range of perspectives, emphasized the scholastic tradition of just war, and published critiques of the possibility of a just ‘modern war’ by e.g. Eric Gill, Franziskus Stratmann OP, and Gerald Vann OP. Blackfriars’ relatively ‘neutral stance’ on the Spanish civil war came in for harsh criticism.
Furthermore, in the late 1930s, Blackfriars published articles by three highly controversial French intellectuals: two articles by Jacques Maritain, who at this time was persona non grata in many Catholic circles for his opposition to Franco; two articles by Yves Congar OP, whose work on ecumenism was highly controversial; and four articles by M. Dominique Chenu OP, whose provocative endorsements of aspects of modernism and whose advocacy of ressourcement theology made him the bête-noire of the (Dominican-dominated) Roman Curia. During this time, White's own theo-politics and views on war were mostly being presented in Blackfriars under the guise of ‘Penguin’. However, that changed on May 12, 1939, as I will discuss below.
I have recounted this early background to Victor White, not only because it shows how perfectly suited White was to address Anscombe's intellectual and spiritual concerns, but also because White's early scholarship, especially his work on Catholic social teaching, generally receives little attention.Footnote 29 White's ground-breaking engagement with psychology, particularly in relation to Carl Jung, has been rightly recognized, thanks to the pioneering work of Ann Lammers and Adrian Cunningham, and developed by Aidan Nichols and Clodagh Weldon.
Unfortunately, this has led some to largely equate Victor White's significance with his engagement with psychology, and this is profoundly mistaken. Up until 1950, of his more than 200 publications, less than 10% dealt with modern psychology. So in 1954, when at age fifty-two, White was granted the Sacrae Theologiae Magister, the highest academic honour in the Dominican Order, it was not based on his work on psychology.Footnote 30 Furthermore, White's work on psychology would have been irrelevant to the incredibly high esteem with which the next generation of Thomists, e.g. Cornelius Ernst, Columba Ryan, and Herbert McCabe held White, and to why scholars like Maritain, Dawson, and MacKinnon, to name just a few, were citing White's writings from the 1930s.
Anscombe's Undergraduate Degree Programme
To understand why Victor White's tutoring Anscombe was so exceptional, one must understand the rubrics of her degree.Footnote 31 Greek and Latin literature were studied for five terms, and then examined (Moderations or ‘Mods’), which Anscombe duly completed in March of 1939.Footnote 32 For the next seven terms, one studied two things: ‘the history and thought of the Greek and Roman worlds’ and ‘Logic and Moral Philosophy both in the Greek and in the modern world’.Footnote 33 Successful completion of examinations in these subjects gave the students a degree in Literae Humaniores, or ‘Greats’ as it was popularly known. The degree regulations allowed and even encouraged a student to focus on his or her strength, i.e. either in ancient history, or in ancient and modern philosophy.
It is understood that an adequate performance in Philosophy is in general demanded for a first class [degree] from a candidate whose chief strength is in History, and an adequate knowledge of History from one whose chief strength is in Philosophy; but the principle of compensation is applied freely. … the philosopher should … have at least an outline knowledge of his periods of history.Footnote 34
With Anscombe, the regulation that ‘the principle of compensation is applied freely’ was apparently taken to an extreme, legend having it that she was awarded a first on the strength of her philosophy papers, despite not being able to recite one fact about Roman history in her ‘Viva’ (i.e. her oral exam).Footnote 35
Victor White first tutored Anscombe from April to June of 1939, at the outset of her ‘Greats’ programme. For a Dominican to teach an undergraduate was unusual in itself, and for Victor White to tutor a ‘Greats’ student, was even more odd, for at least three reasons. First, while they resided in Oxford, Dominicans rarely had any status with the UniversityFootnote 36 and thus were not typically eligible to teach its students.Footnote 37 Second, Anscombe arranged to have White tutor her in medieval philosophy (Aquinas), which was not even a part of the ‘Greats’ curriculum. Third, although White was to tutor Anscombe in philosophy, his formal qualification was in theology.
Evidently, the tutorials were a great success. At the end of May in 1939 White wrote his report to the philosophy tutor at Anscombe's college:
Dear Miss Glover, I was very glad to hear from you of the proposals for four further tutorials [next term] for Miss Anscombe. For although she has been covering the ground with quite astonishing rapidity, there still remain two books of the Contra Gentiles & the short but stiff De Unitate Intellectus which it would be impossible to deal with at all adequately in the two remaining sessions. For my part, I should be very pleased to give her the four tutorials next term, & while I fully understand that her ‘special’ must not interfere with her ordinary work, I think it would be very advantageous if this could be arranged. I am thoroughly pleased with her work for me this term. She has evidently worked very hard, her essays have shown a really intelligent understanding of the matter, & I have found her very quick in overcoming the difficulties which have arisen in the text. I have been particularly pleased at the evidence she has shown of ability at co-relating Aquinas with what she has already learned of later philosophy & later problems.Footnote 38
It is evident that Anscombe was equally happy with the tutorials, as she continued for a second term with White.Footnote 39 Again, White was very happy with Anscombe's progress. ‘I have been completely satisfied with Miss Anscombe's work for me. She has evidently worked hard, & I find her quick & intelligent’. While Anscombe undoubtedly worked diligently in her papers on Aquinas, it is hard to imagine that discussions between her and White, whether during or after their formal tutorials, were restricted to the philosophy of Aquinas. For not only did White and Anscombe both have a passionate interest in Catholic social thought and the morality of war, during this time Anscombe's fiance, Peter Geach, was deciding on whether to become a conscientious objector (which he did). Furthermore, her tutorials with White coincided with the time Anscombe was attending Pax Society meetings in Oxford. Considering that White and MacKinnon were probably Oxford's only two ‘Paxists’ who were publishing on that viewpoint, it is hard to imagine that they did not attend at least some of the meetings. After completing her two terms of tutorials with White on Aquinas, Anscombe was sent to study Plato with Donald MacKinnon (January – June 1940).
MacKinnon, Keble College's Anglo-Catholic philosopher, was one of the first Oxford dons to have a close relationship with the Dominicans, dining at Blackfriars with Victor White and his other Dominican friends on a regular basis.Footnote 40 Fergus Kerr notes that ‘as the recently published histories all say, [MacKinnon] counts as by far the most influential British theologian of the twentieth century’.Footnote 41 He was the third Thomist to formally instruct Anscombe.Footnote 42 After one term, McKinnon reports that ‘Miss Anscombe has been making very good progress with her Platonic books. She covers the ground quickly. She has an unusually clear and definite grasp of her own ideas. She seem to give every prospect of doing first class work in this subject’. After a second term, McKinnon was equally pleased.
Miss Anscombe has been doing very well at her set books, & her essays have always been at a high level. She has a very quick & definite mind, & though I think she would gain in the end by being more tentative in her conclusions, she is certainly forming clear ideas of her own, & ought to be able, after revision, to write α papers on Plato in the schools.Footnote 43
In her final year Anscombe would receive strong evaluations from two other philosophy tutors for her work on modern philosophy (Kant), and logic.Footnote 44
There are some striking features of the roles Victor White and Donald McKinnon played in Anscombe's life as an undergraduate. First, these two Thomists, while teaching her Aquinas and Plato, also shared her Catholic social and political commitments, and undoubtedly helped to confirm her in the Catholicity of her minority viewpoint on the morality of the war. For the fifteen month period during which Anscombe was tutored by White and MacKinnon coincided with the time period during which we know that Anscombe was actively involved with the Pax Society. Second, it was these two tutors who elicited Anscombe's most diligent work, and were probably the tutors most helpful in Anscombe attaining her first. Finally, it is probably no coincidence that White and MacKinnon were the tutors who prepared her for her examination papers on the two ‘canonical’ philosophers Anscombe would turn to most during her philosophical career – Plato and Aquinas.Footnote 45
White, Anscombe, and The Paxists
When Victor White began to tutor Anscombe in April of 1939, White had not made his ‘Paxist’ views publicly known in the same way as had friends such as Eric Gill, Donald Attwater, and Gerald Vann OP. However, that all changed on May 12, 1939, when White published a letter in the Catholic Herald, stating what he took to be the minimum conditions (i.e. moral standards) of British government conduct for a Catholic to licitly participate in the war.Footnote 46 That surely did not escape Anscombe's notice, and perhaps initiated conversations between them on that very topic.Footnote 47 White emphasized in the letter that he presented these standards, not as any kind of threat, but rather so that, just as the authorities knew where the Quakers stood on the morality of war, so too should the authorities know the moral stance of Catholics.
White outlined these ‘minimum standards’ of British conduct in a future war necessary for it to be deemed ‘just’, standards which would be ‘upheld by all who respect the natural law in its integrity’, in five points: first, the war must have a just end, i.e. with limited and concrete ends, so that those fighting know what constitutes a war's successful conclusion;Footnote 48 second, that if the country being attacked was guilty of historical injustices against the aggressor, had made efforts to negotiate an equitable settlement; third, that no Catholic could formally cooperate with any direct killing of non-combatants, nor support a war in which such killing would be a method of warfare; fourth, that all forms of propaganda must be resisted as much as possible; and fifth, that any alliance with the Soviets should be undertaken with deep distrust, and no war would be just which served to extend atheistic communism.
When Anscombe and Daniel published their pamphlet ‘The Justice of the Present War Examined’ in March or April of 1940, their argument in all essential points repeat the views of White, although the logic of the viewpoint was presented in a more sustained fashion. Furthermore, except for their quotes from Pope Pius XII's Summi Pontificatus, which would only be issued in October 1939, there is hardly a citation in Anscombe and Daniel's pamphlet that is not also found in White's or MacKinnon's earlier publications.Footnote 49 In noting this, I am not implying that Anscombe and Daniel actually got all or even any of their sources from White (or MacKinnon), but it points to the striking similarities in their perspectives. Although one cannot claim with any authority that Victor White or Donald MacKinnon were key sources for Anscombe and Daniel's arguments regarding the morality of the war, it is safe to say that the Paxist arguments presented by White and MacKinnon were only in the air amongst a relatively small circle of people, and it was thin air.Footnote 50 However, given the propaganda of the time, and the weakness or vacuity of most so-called moral reflection on war, the air being provided by White and MacKinnon would certainly have been refreshing to Anscombe and Daniel.
Anscombe and Daniel's argument was nuanced and sustained, but not complex.Footnote 51 Their view was that if one's nation is fighting a just war, it is permissible and may be obligatory for the Catholic to participate. However, if it seems that one's rulers may intend to fight an unjust war, then the individual Catholic must discern in conscience the intentions of their rulers with regard to their ends in the war and the means they intend to use in fighting the war. If one's rulers intended ends are unjust and/or the intended means of fighting are unjust, then it would be a sin for a Catholic to participate in such a war. For Catholics are guided in their moral life by the natural law and the divine law, and may not, regardless of their government's demands, sin against God's laws.
A significant portion of Anscombe's and Daniel's pamphlet is a detailed analysis of the intentions of Britain's rulers with regard to their aims and intended means for the war. Their conclusion is unambiguous: a moral ‘condemnation of the war’. While Anscombe and Daniel fully recognize that the Nazis are clearly irrational and evil, beneath British propaganda they find that Britain's ends are not to right the injustices of the Nazis, but to preserve an unjust status quo, and to destroy Germany. As for their means, Britain is already engaged in immoral means by its blockades, and has made clear its intention to directly attack civilians, including unjust reprisals. Finally the government is engaging in the injustice of propaganda. On the basis of their analysis, their conclusion is stark: ‘Only one conclusion is possible: however grievous it may be, those who recognize this cannot participate in this war without sin’.Footnote 52 As Christians ‘we cannot restrain evil by doing sin, or fight for God rejecting him while we do’.Footnote 53 For ‘it is better to suffer the sensation of sterility than… Out of fear to fight the madness of others with a madness of our own’.Footnote 54 Furthermore, they assert that it is both the right and duty for individuals to discern the justice of a war. They may not simply ‘write a blank cheque’ to their rulers, but must in conscience judge the morality of the war.
Why Publish their Pamphlet?
Given the similarities between Anscombe and Daniel's pamphlet and White's letter (and his other publications on war), one must thus ask why they bothered. If Anscombe and Daniel were more or less repeating arguments already being made by White, or in other Pax literature by luminaries like Eric Gill, Donald Attwater, or Gerald Vann OP, what was their point in publishing their pamphlet? While the Pax Bulletin praised their article as being very helpful to potential COs, it was a very lonely enterprise to be publishing their pamphlet in April of 1940, when fear of a possible invasion of Britain by Germany was beginning to grip the country. Furthermore, publishing their pamphlet was not only likely to bring rebuke from their Archbishop (which it did), it might provoke legal action against them.Footnote 55 So what pushed them to publish it?
Any answer to that question is necessarily speculative, but soon after the war began, five months after White's May 12th letter, there were signs of discord in Blackfriars, about which, considering her views on the morality of the war that Britain intended to fight, Anscombe could not have been happy. In the October 1939 issue of Blackfriars, Hilary Carpenter OP, still officially editor of Blackfriars, produced his first editorial for more than 2 years. The careful reflection about the morality of war which had been nurtured in Blackfriars in previous months and years was nowhere to be seen. Carpenter began his editorial speaking for ‘all the peoples of England’, that our war aim ‘is wholly and objectively good’, that we stand ‘for freedom and liberty’, that all of us have ‘a clear and well-informed conscience as to the objective rightness’ of our aims and that while sometimes war is complicated, in this instance ‘all of our consciences should be clear’. He then added, quoting the Catholic Bishop of the Armed Forces, that Britain's cause is ‘right and just in the eyes of God and of all good men’. Although the war was only weeks old, Carpenter dispatched all possible moral and religious objections, without offering a single moral or theological argument.
Having dismissed any possible moral or spiritual objections, Carpenter then pointed to the potential moral and spiritual benefits of the war. Carpenter connected a moral benefit with the new opportunities for suffering. While ‘there can be no doubt that those who suffer most in war are those who least deserve to suffer’, by ‘the calm spirit of readiness to accept tremendous self-sacrifice … there is something to be gained … in the moral order’. And what is the spiritual benefit by the suffering of those who least deserve it? ‘There is something essentially Christian in this. It … may well be a God-given way of paying the price … for the liberty of the adoption of the sons of God. … That is the divine providence and that the opportunity of this present war”’.Footnote 56 It must have been hard for discerning readers to believe that such claims were coming from Blackfriars. Devoid of any moral or theological argument, it was not a call to faith or the gospel of Jesus Christ, but a panegyric to the romance of war.
Strangely, for the first time since the January 1934 issue, the October 1939 issue did not feature Penguin's ‘Extracts and Comments’. However, in its place was a short, unsigned article, although clearly by White, consisting of a single extract and a single comment, entitled ‘Reprisals’. The extract was from the Sept 4th issue of Osservatore Romano, commenting on the German and Anglo-French replies to Roosevelt's appeal for ‘humane warfare’, where both parties said they would refrain from civilian bombardment on condition that the others did the same. An excerpt from the long extract reads as follows:
And let there be no talk - none! - of reprisals. Our words here must be plain and strong. Let no one quote against us the ‘harsh law of necessity’; that is another ready-made phrase to screen one kind of harshness only - that of cruelty. Reprisals against civilian populations are a monstrous thing. The innocent would still pay for the guilty. Against the innocent victims of the one side would be set the innocent victims of the other. Not thus are humanity and offended justice to be appeased; this is no repayment of injuries; it is complicity in a crime … The law of retaliation applied to those unarmed, to women and children and the aged - one has only to think of it, only to formulate it to arouse in every soul an unequalled horror, to find oneself powerless in any language to express its shameful, accursed meaning.
Following the extended extract, the ‘comment’ was only one sentence long.
BLACKFRIARS feels that every publicity should be given to this most Christian appeal which, we cannot doubt, has the approval, if not the actual authority of the Holy Father himself.Footnote 57
Although White was only assistant editor of Blackfriars, here, seemingly for the first time, White signed an ‘extract and comment’ not by ‘Penguin’, but on behalf of Blackfriars as a whole. The editor could not have been pleased.Footnote 58
Ironically, Carpenter's editorial was a perfect exemplification of what White had written in Blackfriars only five months earlier, that when the gospel of Jesus Christ is sold out to the ends of nationalistic propaganda, it only serves to discredit the gospel once a war is over. That was White's argument as to why neither the propaganda of nations nor of nationalistic Church Heirarchies could be trusted to guide the conscientious decisions of individual Catholics as to the moral acceptability of participating in a war:
The scandal of ‘the failure of the Churches’ during the world-war of 1914–1918 … are too evident for us to ignore. … The ‘recruiting parsons’ may have helped to fill the trenches during the war; they certainly succeeded in emptying the pews afterwards. The shallow casuistry with which they sought to evade the Sermon on the Mount disqualified them in the eyes of thousands from being taken seriously as authentic representatives of Christ. … The ‘God our help in ages past’ so constantly invoked was the petty British tribal god of the Recessional. … [The Churches] excelled all others in the propagation of self-righteous cant, … elevating the Kaiser to the dignity of Anti-Christ. … When the war was over and seen as the sordid and futile waste it really was, it was widely felt that ‘Christianity had failed’. Failed, not the world only, but its own message. The war to end war, the war which was to establish the reign of righteousness and justice, left the world worse off and with more injustice than before. Christians had succumbed to propaganda instead of bearing witness to the truth.Footnote 59
After the October 1939 issue of Blackfriars with its dueling messages, Penguin continued on, but his column was reduced by 80%.Footnote 60 In addition, no other article by White on the subject of war would appear in Blackfriars for the duration of WWII, despite the fact that at the end of White's ‘War and the Early Church’ (Blackfriars, Sept 1939), he had promised an article on medieval perspectives on war would follow.Footnote 61
In early 1940, when Anscombe and Daniel were preparing to publish their pamphlet, they were surely aware of the difficulties being faced by Victor White and Gerald Vann among the Dominicans. Even the utterly fearless Eric Gill was confiding in letters that soon he might not be able to speak about the morality of the war.Footnote 62 These few voices who, Anscombe was convinced, were legitimately questioning Britain's morality in fighting the war, were being silenced. This takes us back to her 1938 article, where Anscombe clearly stated that her task as a Catholic was to be a witness, and to witness to the ‘Catholic social scheme’. Her 1940 pamphlet was a rigorous and prophetic call to faithfulness in light of that Catholic social scheme. Could it be that Anscombe and Daniel realized that the Catholic voices who inspired them were being silenced, and that they were having none of that, and so saw themselves as trying to keep a torch from being extinguished? Of course, we cannot know with any certainty why Anscombe and Daniel published their pamphlet in April of 1940, but the account I have provided was certainly in line with Anscombe's strong convictions, both about the morality of the war, and about being a witness.
