It is no doubt inevitable that the Holy See should have been unjustly condemned and wrongly praised by prejudiced or ill- informed people in this country and elsewhere, especially during the years of war and its aftermath. The Holy Father has been condemned when some word or action of his did not, or was deemed not to, conform to the ideology or bias of the critic, just as he has been praised according to an equally false norm of criticism. If he blessed a group of Catholics who happened to be Italians and soldiers, or expressed approbation of Catholics who happened to be Spanish, or condemned the intrinsic evil of an atheistic Communism propounded by men who happened to be Russians, he was dubbed fascist. If he gave succour to British prisoners of war, condemned the evil of Nazism as propounded by the Germans, or pleaded for the Jews persecuted by the totalitarian states, or welcomed to the Vatican the Allied Commanders and their troops, he was congratulated (grudgingly enough, it is true) on these presumed expressions of approval of the Allied cause.

It could hardly be expected that the run of mankind in this narrow, materialistic, selfish, modem world should appreciate the simple truth that the Holy Father both is and acts as the Vice-regent of Christ upon this earth; and that he has a peculiar obligation of paternity in regard to Catholics of all nations; that he has a God-given duty to proclaim to all men the basic principles of morality and to condemn in no uncertain voice, and without respect of persons, any blatant and general disregard of them; that he is bound to regard himself as the universal protector of those in need and the protagonist of justice for all mankind.

The title of this article has been borrowed from one in The Atlantic Monthly for January 1944 by the Reverend Phillips Endecott Osgood, Rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston. In his opening paragraph he records that ‘at a recent conference at Columbia on Science, Philosophy, and Religion two delegates voiced the pungent opinion that “the entire missionary movement should be stopped”. They raised a vigorous demurrer to the axiom that “the post-war world can be built successfully only on the basis of Christianity” and categorically denied that “we are fighting to save Christian civilization”. Granted that only two of the delegates exploded this bombshell, nevertheless there are persons not delegates to this august conference who would second the motion—both at home and, more understandably, among the nationalists in the non-Christian countries’.

The rest of his article is chiefly taken up with an examination of that nationalist attitude in Japan, India, and China, and while he seems to be in general accord with the familiar Catholic thesis that ‘the Church can then only be said to be founded in a region when it is self-governing, with its own churches, its own native clergy, its own resources: in a word, when it depends on nobody but itself’ (S. Cong. Propaganda, May 20th, 1923), it is not clear that he rejects what he styles a ‘steady liberalization of Christian eredalism’, or that he looks upon Christianity as anything more than an ornament to ‘revivified native faiths—a higher Buddhism, a cultured Hinduism, a reborn Mohammedanism, a philosophic Taoism, an assertive Shintoism’.

The hundredth birthday of the Co-Operative Movement passed almost unnoticed among Catholics in this country. The only commemoration was a supplement to the Catholic Worker. This is in keeping with the strange aloofness of Catholics in Great Britain from the movement. Yet it contrasts with the interest displayed by Catholics in many other lands.

In the United States the well-known Queen’s Work and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference set up a joint committee to celebrate the Rochdale Centennial. The celebrations were a great success and included a letter from the Papal Secretary of State, two nation-wide rallies, leaflets and folders, special sermons and talks to school children and the publication of a pamphlet. In Quebec, where a Dominican edits an official co-operative journal, in Nova Scotia, where the movement owes much to a Catholic university, and in many other areas the celebrations were on as vast a scale and were supported by leading members of the hierarchy.

lt is a great joy to be able to give some account, in the friendly columns of Blackfriars of La Vie Intellectuelle, the Dominican review which started to appear again last February after four-and- a-half years of silence. That joy is all the greater, because during the occupation we always envisaged our work after the war as united to that of Catholics throughout the world, but especially to that of our English brethren, linked to us as they are by the closest of ties. It was indeed because I had tried to get into touch with them, despite the German occupation, in order to prepare for this work for the Church, that I, with one of my brethren, Pète Dubarle, was arrested on the Swiss frontier in March, 1944. Only a few days after my liberation I was able to meet in France some of my friends from across the Channel, and now, less than a year later, on a visit to England, I can write, in an English review, something of what has happened and of our hopes for the future.

To begin with, let me recall what La Vie Intellectuelle stood for before the war. Begun in 1929, under the editorship of Père Bernadot, that indefatigable creator of reviews, who started La Vie Spirituelle, as well as many other publications, La Vie Intellectuelle was animated by a small group of Dominicans, with the active collaboration of many secular priests and lay people. Its aim was to contribute in France to that intellectual effort required in order to make the influence of the Church felt in the world. We know with what interest Pius XI, and after him, Pius XII, always encouraged such efforts.

“He starts as if to make a philosophic statement about the Universe and breaks off with a gruffi disclaimer’’ (E. M. Forster).

It is a fair generalization to say that modern novels, that is, novels written during the past twenty-five years, invite the reader to a discussion of the writer’s personality. It is Conrad’s reticence, above all, that places him as the last English traditional novelist, at the end of the line running from Fielding through Dickens.

It is unfortunate that Conrad’s reticence, his effort at impersonality, should lead to a belief that he has no emotions to reveal. For in popular estimation Typhoon ranks as Conrad’s greatest novel, and Conrad himself has come to be considered as a sort of McWhirr—a methodical sea-dog of settled convictions, but unaccountably gifted with a romantic imagination which enabled him to write sea-stories. And although it is good to see Conrad being republished at all, I hope it will not seem ungracious to Messrs Dent if I register my misgivings at their recent republication of Typhoon, and wish that they had chosen one of his novels (say, Heart of Darkness) which invited speculation as to Conrad’s personality and which was more central in his achievement.

Matthew Paris, writing of the last expedition of Alexander II, king of Scots, said that it was reported to be due to “the constant urging of a certain indiscreet bishop of Strathearn, a friar, of a truth, of the Order of Preachers’’. (Chron. Maj., V. p. 89; Rolls Ser.) This indiscreet bishop was Clement of Dunblane, with whom the history of the Dominican Order in Scotland begins. Apart from the words of Matthew Paris, there appears to be nothing written about him which is not laudatory, and since the 17th century at least he has commonly been referred to by Scottish writers, whether Catholic or Protestant, as “Saint Clement”, although there has never been any authorisation of cultus. The title is probably due solely to Camerarius, who assigned Bishop Clement a place in his calendar of Scottish saints, under the date March 19th. But before that time warm praise was given to Clement, though not the name of saint, both by mediaeval Scottish writers and by chroniclers of his own order; and it is safe to say that no Scottish Dominican has left so great a memory, and few others are so deserving of remembrance.

Modern men are inclined to disregard the power of ideas. With Hitler and a number of his lieutenants dead and the others in captivity it seems to them that Clio has written finìs to the short, though comprehensive chapter, “National Socialism”. Our age is wont to see things purely in terms of politics and politics in terms of material power. If this were true, National Socialism would have found its end with the destruction of .its material power and its organisation. National Socialism, however, was not only a political machinery, masses and guns, it was also, and above all, an idea. When the Nazis spoke of totality they avowedly wished to make it clear that they would not confine themselves to economics and politics, or indeed, confine themselves to anything. Their idea was that of an all-embracing Weltanschauung, a definite order of values with the claim to be absolute, or in other words, a religion.

While insane national pride, injured by the defeat in 1918, together with economic and social pressure created an atmosphere suitable for revolution, the real core of the Nazi movement lay in a much deeper stratum of the people's minds. The revolution against the religion of love and the spirit of the Sermon of the Mount—prepared during centuries and manifest in Bismarck’s fight against “Ultramontanism”—rose immediately after 1918, sponsored by Hitler’s forerunner and temporary companion Ludendorff. His wife Mathilde, especially, attempted to preach a romantic mysticism in form of a queer combination of pantheism and Wodan idolatry, which seemed to her the adequate expression of the Teutonic religious spirit. This experiment failed since the theatrical nightly ceremonies in woods and the sight of spectacled German schoolmasters growing wild beards and drinking beer from wassailhorns proved too much even for the most romantic German little bourgeois.

In the month of June, 1946, the fourth centenary of Franciscus de Vitoria was celebrated at Salamanca before a concourse of theologians and lawyers and scholars from all parts of the world.

Relatively speaking, one imagines that the name of Franciscus de Vitoria means more to the world today than it did at the date of his first or his second or his third centenary. In these last years, men of many lands, one may say men of all the lands, have come to acknowledge the debt that international law owes to him as its first founder. Years ago Holland, the birthplace of Grotius, made handsome acknowledgment; as France has done, and Italy too; and all the Americas. On 23rd December, 1933, the Seventh International Conference of American States, passed a resolution ‘that a bust of the Spanish theologian, Francisco de Vitoria, be placed in the headquarters of the Pap-Ameriean Union in Washington, as a tribute to the Professor of Salamanca, who, in the 16th century, established the foundations of modern International Law’.

In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the good Doctor is said to have spoken with great emotion these words: ‘I love the University of Salamanca ; for when the Spaniards were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that it was not lawful’. At the celebrations of 1946, in Salamanca, Dr Brierly the distinguished professor of International Law of the University of Oxford attended. His acknowledgment, and the acknowledgment of Dr Johnson, go not only for Oxford but also for England.