For an order of Preachers the written word is as essential a means of communication as the spoken word. The monthly editorial comment in New Blackfriars is one of a considerable variety of styles of literary communication practised by the English Dominican Province, and one which is closer to oral preaching than other styles since it must make its impact on the immediacies of a rapidly changing historical life. If such contemporary comment is to be effective, it must try to stimulate and provoke consciences, and so to inform them in a personal life of faith. A monthly comment which merely pronounced ‘timeless truths’ would be irrelevant. It is plain that a concern for the significance of the present moment is exposed to dangers very similar to those of pulpit preaching; audacity may slide into rashness. An editor must have a discriminating awareness of his audience, for the Comment is part of a two-way communication taking place over a period of time with an audience free to enter into discussion with the editor or to abandon it. It would be surprising if remarks made within a context of discussion built up in this way were not to appear eccentric or outrageous when presented in selective quotation with sensational headlining to a quite different audience; and it would be improper to assess these remarks in isolation from a total context which includes not merely a single month’s comment but a whole continuing debate conducted over months and years in the pages of a monthly periodical.

Anything written about China, other than for the daily press, risks being out of date long before it gets into print. By the time this is being read, the differences between Chairman Mao and the administrative set-up in Peking may have been finally resolved, or shelved; there may even have been an intervention — though it is difficult to conceive of the Americans being foolish enough to back it — from Chiang Kai Shek. In theory, he has been awaiting just such a time of internecine strife to send an expeditionary force across to the mainland. That is, of course, if the strife is really as violent as we have been led to believe. English visitors recently (January 1967) in Canton suggest that although a few months ago there was a serious likelihood of the army under Mao moving from Shanghai against an army raised from Peking by Liu Shao Chi, this clash has been averted, and rumours of violent deaths by the hundreds in cities like Nanking seem to lack foundation.

No doubt a movement with the youthful intensity of the Red Guards will not fade back into obscurity without some violence somewhere — you can’t summon up this massive support from a nation’s youth (their ages seem to range from 10 to 18) and then deprive it of an active outlet. But before we jump to hasty conclusions we should be very wary of press reports, particularly from correspondents who, though they may have been inside China for a week or so (it doesn’t seem to be all that difficult to get in) can’t converse with the Chinese without an interpreter,

Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.

To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.

If Ford Madox Ford is more widely read and discussed today than he was a few years ago, then most of the credit must go to the Americans. In the late thirties, Ford’s reputation was at an absolute nadir in England, only twenty years after he had been at the centre of the metropolitan literary scene. The English Review, which Ford edited between 1908 and 1910, was one of the most distinguished publications ever to appear in the English-speaking world: the contributors to the first issue included Hardy, James, Conrad, Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, Tolstoy, and Wells, while later numbers included the first published work of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. Ford may, indeed, have been half-remembered as a great editor, but his own creative achievement as a novelist was resolutely disregarded. Thus, Mr Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938, contains a useful chronological list of key works of modern literature published between 1900 and 1932.If we look up the entry for the year 1915, we see titles by Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, and Somerset Maugham, but no word of Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Again, Mr Connolly gives a very comprehensive list of books for the years 1924 to 1928, but says nothing of Some Do Not and the other sections of Ford’s long novel about Christopher Tietjens, now known collectively as Parade's End. And Parade's End is certainly regarded in America as one of the major achievements of modern English fiction.

Gabriel Moran has written an important and disturbing book. It is disturbing because it challenges practically every axiom of modem Catechetics. Just when it seemed we were getting somewhere we are made to wonder if we have to start all over again.

For about sixty years now the Catechetical movement has been working away to bring new life into the teaching of religion, to make religion relevant to the lives of the pupils; and in this it has achieved considerable success.

One of the first things that Catechetical experts turned their attention to was the danger of verbalism and jargon. Thus, the ‘penny Catechism’ with its archaic, involved and abstract vocabulary was soon under fire. Although not long ago Catechetics was regarded by many as the off-beat hobby of a few cranks, recently (and especially since Vatican II) it has become respectable and even fashionable. Catechetical books pour on to the markets, and phrases such as kerygma, Salvation History and the Four Ways are to be heard in staff-room and presbytery. And it is just this that worries Brother Moran! He is conscious that Catechetics has reached a crisis. There is a danger of complacency and fossilization. We may wake up and find that instead of a renewed theology we have merely a new jargon.

The modern urge to dig up one’s roots to inspect their state of health has not escaped the Benedictines, and the spirited winds of the Vatican Council no less than of the September 1966 Rome Council of Abbots have given the urge an added impetus. The issues are broad and ontological, ranging from liturgical adaptation to the question ‘what is a monk?’. But no issue exercises theorists and practitioners alike so vehemently as that of the tension, as old as the ages of man, between Mary and Martha, between the contemplative and the active vocation. Both schools of thought agree that nihil opere Dei praeponatur (RB XLIII); but where the contemplative school believes that laborare et orare embraces the essential Benedictine life, the active school insists on the wider formula orare et laborare et praedicare. The latter believes as a corollory that something of orare which the contemplatives allot to lectio divina (essentially a preparation for prayer, if not an indirect mode of prayer itself), should be allotted in part to the necessary preparation praedicare – i.e. that prayer and apostolic work feed on one another and are mutually supporting in the monk’s proper pursuit of the unum necessarium.

Both schools are returning to the fontes of monasticism, to Pachomius, Basil, Cassian, the Regula Magistri, the Regula Benedicti, S. Gregory’s Dialogues, in order to test and substantiate their case for the form of monastic life they favour.