No religious Order can stand aloof from the aggiornamento that is affecting the entire Church nor declare itself immune from the impact of Vatican Council II. Even those institutions that are the oldest in the Church, such as monasticism, must reappraise themselves in the light of contemporary trends. Such a re-examination becomes even more urgent in view of the attitude of many that the monastic Orders are to be the preservers of the old or traditional ways while the rest of the Church is updated. Do monastic Orders, in this view, become preservers of a really ancient tradition that is still vital for them, or rather the preservers of a nineteenth and twentieth century interpretation that no longer answers the needs of themselves nor of the Church ? Do they not have a duty to define themselves and their role in the Church, as well as give some consideration to the vitality of the image of monasticism that they have inherited from the great monastic revivers of the last century, before consigning themselves to the preconceived role of museum keepers in the Church ?

Within monastic communities today there is a healthy re-examination of fundamentals. Although not all the answers are present to the questions being asked, it is a sign of growth that such questions are being posed. One of the clearest signs of renewal is a re-awakening of interest in the eremitical life. In the early centuries in the East, the eremitic and cenobitic ways of monasticism existed side by side, and many instances are recorded of monks passing temporarily from one to the other.

The purpose of this article is to study the outlook on Catholicism of Sir John Acton, later Lord Acton the famous historian, when he was living in Shropshire as a young bachelor. During his boyhood the provision of a chaplain had been arranged with the Bishop by his mother. Lady Granville.

A certain light is thrown on Acton's religious approach by an account of his dealings with the chaplains who served Aldenham between his coming of age and the final closing of the chapel. During the eighteenth century such chaplaincies, which were then at the hub of Catholic rural life, had been for the most part served either by the religious orders or by some relative or dependent of the squire's family. With the development of the big industrial populations, it became harder to obtain a suitable priest for work of an increasingly restricted scope. There were certain exceptional cases, like Wardour Castle, where the Jesuits had agreed to make a permanent provision. Aldenham, however, normally depended on the priests available in that section of the old Midland District.

At this time the Aldenham appointment had a quite special significance. Lord and Lady Granville had now retired to London and the priest chosen would be the daily companion of the young baronet, who lived at Aldenham when in the country. It would, therefore, appear that the Bishop of Shrewsbury had allowed Acton to make his own suggestion.

The term ‘liberal studies’ arouses responses of approval, derision and perplexity. Those who approve of it do so in post-prandial statements, amidst the fug of cigar smoke-industrialists lamenting the narrow education of new entrants to industry. Those who deride it do so because they identify the term with a superior culture to which they are not admitted, something to do with making the right noises during the interval at Glyndebourne. The perplexed command most sympathy for their attitude. They are in genuine doubt what the term means.

Most people can identify a liberal attitude and recognise a liberally educated man when they see one. It is difficult to find two people who agree what is the best education to produce this desirable end-product. And there the debate lies. There are many contestants in the field. Historically the strongest, though the one heard least, is the claim of Greats at Oxford. This degree produced the most complete man. But the voice is drowned in the general clamour of economists, sociologists and historians pressing their claims.

A liberal education has always been the concern of teachers, but only recently has the term ‘liberal studies’ come into prominence. Much of its impetus stems from a Ministry of Education circular issued in the midfifties and directed at technical colleges. The 1956 White Paper on technical education heralded an enormous advance in full-time education for technologists. Before the war, they had won their technical laurels via the hard grind of evening classes.

Nothing is more important than that Catholics should continually ask themselves: how bad a state is the Church in? We are all aware of the possibility that the Church may appear to be corrupt, and of the actualization of this possibility at various times in the past. But we tend, I think, to assume that such corruption will always be glaringly obvious, a matter of simony at the papal court, or pluralist bishops, or priests with concubines and children : we therefore conclude that, to the extent that things seem all right, so they must be all right. Whereas in fact, I suspect, corruption is seldom easily recognized at the time. Perhaps even the examples I have just mentioned, which seem to us so scandalous, were not felt at the time as symptoms of deep-seated disease: after all, we know that the Church is composed, not of angels, but of men, and that we have no right to expect perfection from Christians, bishops included; so probably these things were usually put down as instances of the kind of human weakness that we know that we have to reckon with. Thus we must be prepared, at any time, to find that the Church can be deeply corrupted, a corruption for which we shall be sternly judged but to which we have long been blind.

When we have recognized that the Church can be corrupt, we have to enquire what could make it possible for this corruption to take place: and this is the most serious theological enquiry that can be made, for it concerns our understanding of the nature of the Church.

Perhaps it is worth while beginning by taking a look at the traditional Catholic teaching on the just war. to see how and why it developed. It is significant that, in approaching the question of war. Aquinas asks whether it is always sinful to wage war. His discussion of this topic concludes with the formulation of three conditions for a war to be just. His doctrine has been elaborated by later theologians and perhaps the most comprehensive brief statement is to be found in the following passage from Father Henry Davis, S.J.:

What effect have the new theological insights on our understanding of the life of prayer? It is a question of impact on the spirit of man. Theology deals with God, but it concerns man, and therefore, if a theology is to have any impact on the age it lives in, it must answer the questions which men of that age ask. Otherwise, however wide its research and valid its conclusions, it will remain outside the current of life. The best way. therefore, to examine the spirituality of the new theology is to begin by by examining the needs of modern man. From our understanding of the latter will grow our appreciation of the former.

Man's understanding of himself has developed in the modern age. A hundred years ago, if you said ‘person’ you conjured up the image of separateness. Words like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘inalienable’ rose to the lips. Man was thought of primarily as an individual with rights of his own, an island in a sea of other islands. But now we understand things differently. Without denying the inalienability and essential separateness of a person, we think it equally necessary to stress that he is only a person because he can enter into relations with other persons; that, as well as existing in himself, he also exists for other people; that ‘the most vital core of man does not consist in the solitary and hardened affirmation of his individual autonomy, but in availability, welcome, receptivity'. (Charles Moeller). In fact that man is not an island, but part of the main.

Is mysticism compatible with Christianity? With so rich a mystical tradition as that possessed by the Catholic Church, this might seem a superfluous question to ask. But the term ‘mysticism’ which for Catholics has normally meant a direct apprehension of God, initiated by God and leading to the closest union of the soul with God, has nowadays been called upon to cover a variety of states of soul which many Catholics would not consider to be mystical at all since there is no direct confrontation of person with Person, no union between the two poles and no love.

Be this as it may, I propose for the purposes of this article to include two well-known types of preternatural experience as ‘mystical’ because, in non-Catholic circles, they are usually considered to be so, and because the characteristic of each is that the ‘mystic feels himself to be transplanted beyond time and space into an eternal ‘now’ in which death can have no relevance and man's natural condition is seen to be one of certain immortality. This type of experience can be ‘extroverted', that is, the soul feels itself to be merged in the undying life of all things; or it can be ‘introverted', in which case the soul plunges into its own deepest essence from which all that is phenomenal, transient, and conditioned, falls away and it sees itself as unfractionably one and beyond all the dualities of worldly life.

At one time to call any one an automaton was by no means a compliment; today the term may be used to praise exemplary behaviour. What has brought about this change of meaning?

If we take the question on the practical side, the answer seems to lie in an analysis of the achievements of modern engineering. Today engineers can make, and do make, machines which control themselves and each other. Such machines recognize the requirements of a given situation and adapt their behaviour to those requirements by selecting the means most fitting to the end. In process of such adaptation, they apply rules which they have previously learnt and some machines can even find a new rule to meet a fresh situation and ‘remember’ the rule when the need occurs.

In all this machines resemble men in their behaviour and, although they have not man's variety of response, they outstrip him in accuracy and speed. They are largely self-directing and the need for supervision is reduced to a minimum. Once his machines are set up, the engineer's job is reduced to the task of keeping them in first-class condition and when necessary, ‘telling’ them what they are expected to do.

If we translate the behaviour of machines into human terms, we shall find what is ideally the goal of those in control of men and of those who are controlled.

When I was young a book with this sort of title and written by Catholics would have been intended as an answer; the Church would have been defended. One can plausibly imagine some of the contributors: Belloc and Chesterton, not yet, respectively, too old or dead; Fathers Martindale and McNabb; Mr Waugh speaking for youth and perhaps Eric Gill (a bit uneasy with some of the company) for art. Count de la Bedoyère's team are of a different kidney. All but two of them seem far more concerned to raise than to answer objections, and if the formula of our imaginary book might have been ‘Yes, but . . . ‘, that of the present one is rather ‘Yes, and...', followed by a strong recommendation that it is high time something was done about it. The common mood, in short, is one of protest, the common aim is reform. Hence it isn't surprising, given the Church's established structure, that the general tone may fairly, if loosely, be described as anticlerical. And it is perhaps here, rather than in the particular views and arguments put forward, that this book's chief interest and significance lies, – not, of course, simply in its being slanted towards anticlericalism, but in its being so in a new, contemporary way.

In the twenties and thirties there were currents of anticlerical feeling in English Catholicism, but they were small and scattered, and, more important, they neither claimed nor expected much support from theology.

Apart from the conclusion that he draws, the fault that I find with Fr Herbert McCabe's paper is this: he connects the concept of natural law much too closely with the fact ‘that we are not isolated individuals, we are parts, fragments... of a larger community, the human race.’ It is true that some parts of the natural law are based on that fact – e.g. the prohibition on theft.

But the notion ‘against the natural law’ is simply equivalent in extension to the notion ‘what is wrong'. Belief in the natural law is the belief that the discoveries of reason about ethics are the promulgation of laws to the rational creature by the Creator. The content of the natural law is thus simply the content of ethics, so far as this is independent of revelation.

'Extrapolation', says the dictionaries, ‘is the method of finding by calculation, based on the known terms of a series, other terms, whether preceding or following.’ The method is proper to mathematics and works efficiently when dealing with number and quantity. When it is transferred to the realm of quality and of organic life, more still to that of history and of culture, it tends to lose its precisely exact scientific quality and becomes a venture in creativity, or, at any rate, a work of fantasy. Imagination now takes the place of calculation. There can be no doubt that the scientist who seeks to learn the origin of man from a fossilized remnant of a skull that might have belonged to a man or to a baboon, must be blessed with a creative imagination as well as with a scientifically exact intelligence. I suppose that when Robert Ardrey, a playwright rather than a professional scientist, sub-titles his book ‘A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man’ he is serving notice that he intends to extrapolate with unrestrained imaginative abandon. At any rate, this is what he does !.

There is of course a good basis of scientific evidence in African Genesis. The most recent discoveries of paleontology made in Africa, especially the most notable, those of Dr L. S. B. Leakey at Olduvai in Tanganyika, give very convincing indications that the origin of man was in Africa not in Asia.

An approach to this theme must be very tentative. Enormous shifts in emphasis and sense of direction are taking place in the Church today and it is not easy to see the effect they can have in fields of thought and action which have of late been less explored. It is strange that one of these should be the missionary field, but it seems true. The Council's preoccupations hitherto have been elsewhere. The outright rejection of the schema on the Missions in the third session was evidence not only of its own inadequacy but also of a possible general consciousness among the Fathers that this crucial subject had not yet been considered by them with requisite seriousness. The great project on The Church in the Modern World’ will obviously also be of the deepest significance for missionary thinking. To attempt any sort of a rounded statement on the subject at the moment would seem then to be out of the question. All one can do is to present some of the intellectual problems behind mission work today and also to gather together what new insights into the meaning and strategy of our work already published conciliar decrees and current theology can offer us.

Certainly mission thinking today must undergo a thorough renewal; our work cannot continue to be carried on with the attitudes and methods that have prevailed with relatively slight changes over the last century. Doubtless the need for this renovation has not been recognized as yet sufficiently or at a deep enough level by those engaged in the work.

The argument that the study of Latin and Greek is justified because it disciplines or trains the mind is a weak one. Taken to its extreme it involves the fallacy that training for an activity is separable from that activity itself; that you can train a mind to discover the truth, without the person whose mind it is having to decide whether any part of his experience is in fact true or false. You cannot do this. If you are to learn the truth, or some part of the truth, then you must learn the truth. There is no preliminary activity you can engage in which makes you able to know, without actually knowing anything. The only way to train the mind is to use the mind: and to use the mind you must direct it to something outside the mind : something that is worth while in itself.

How worthwhile then in themselves are Greek and Latin? Simply as languages they have no special magic. If you want to learn a language more firmly inflected than English, you might quite happily learn German. If you want to enter a new world of language, then learn Russian. This does not mean that we should decry the purely linguistic study of Latin and Greek – writing proses, and verse too, if you want. But it should be seen for what it is: a technique, a mental craft.

This article is not about mercy, but about ‘mercy', the English word. This word is the stock translation in religious texts of the Latin word misericordia. My contention is going to be that the quality of ‘mercy’ is far too strained to stand for misericordia; that not only is it an inadequate word to translate the Latin word, it is – more seriously – an insufficient word to convey the full Christian, religious thing. And as this thing, as this value is practically at the heart of the Christian gospel, the good news of God to man, the use of an insufficient and hence misleading word to represent it can have very unfortunate consequences indeed. But with these I am not here concerned. My interest is in finding the best English word or words for translating misericordia in liturgical texts. And my way of doing this is going to be by putting ‘mercy’ on trial.

Misericordia, it scarcely needs saying, appears so often in liturgical texts because it appears so often in the Bible. Two other Latin words appear frequently in its company, the related noun miseratio, usually in the plural miserationes, and the related verb misereor. The first weakness of the English ‘mercy’ is shown by the fact that it does duty, either by itself or in a phrase like ‘have mercy', for all three of these Latin words.

It is the common teaching of the Church, reaffirmed by successive popes and to be found in all reputable textbooks of moral theology, that the use of mechanical contraceptives which interfere with intercourse is always wrong. Whether this common teaching amounts to the ordinary magisterium in the technical sense and is therefore infallible is another matter, but short of such assurance it would be hard to find a clearer guide for the Christian who wants to know what he should do or not do. It should be emphasized that even those theologians who think there are legitimate uses for the pill nearly always distinguish between this and mechanical contraceptives. It is indeed clear that these are two quite different matters; contraceptives interfere directly with the act of intercourse whereas the pill does not.

It is a mistake to suppose that we do not know anything until we know it infallibly. There are a great many topics about which a Catholic ought to have sure and definite views just because he is a Catholic, even though the infallible magisterium of the Church has not yet pronounced upon them. He should know, for example, without waiting for the pope to tell him, that it is wicked to propose to drop a nuclear bomb on a city under any circumstances. Similarly if a Catholic wants to know whether he should use mechanical contraceptives or not he does not need to wait for an infallible papal pronouncement to get the answer.

There wasn't much heard about Christian belief in the recent British election campaign, in spite of occasional Christian appeals to the candidates’ consciences; but then, with a renewed sense among Christians of the secular significances of the term ‘moral', this lack of directly Christian discussion ought not to be too disturbing: we were, after all, electing a government, not a parish council. What can usefully be looked at, however, is the degree of moral emphasis, in a general sense, in the parties’ programmes: how far was this a humane election ?

The Liberal Party is important here, because it focusses a complex of attitudes which have been dominant in British politics over the past few years. At the peak of its form, Jo Grimond's party stood for an impatient, dynamic streamlining of society, a tough concern with efficiency; Liberalism was a force to disperse the cobwebs, and the cobwebs included talk of class-warfare and socialization of industry as much as Tory old-boyism and bungling. There was an attractive radicalism about this, and it won over a good many people who failed to see that dynamism and efficiency are morally neutral terms which can shove out the central moral issues and reduce politics to technique and organization. At the Liberal Party conferences the hall was full of young men rearing to get industry off the ground and eliminate wastage and failure; the talk centred on expansion and cutting through red-tape, progress was the key-term.