My opportunities for studying Catholicism in the United States were fragmentary, in the course of a year devoted to university teaching and travel. I had the good fortune to be teaching at what is generally taken to be the best of the Catholic universities, Notre Dame, Indiana; and it was in the main from this particular listening post that I picked up my information and my views. I did travel a good deal in the Middle West and the Far West and this gave me an opportunity to see in passing some aspects of Catholic life. As well, I went to non-Catholic universities and was able to see both the reactions of non-Catholic Americans to Catholicism and the work of Catholics in non-Catholic universities, particularly through the Newman centres. I was also a steady and, in some instances, horrified reader of the Catholic press.

What I want to do is to examine American Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon. I do not think that anything I have to say is directly relevant to the problems of Catholic higher education in this country, except in so far as comparisons are always likely to turn out to be instructive. American society and its problems are so remote in many if not all respects from the problems of any European society that it is hard to see at first that American Catholic higher education offers either models for us to imitate or examples of what we should avoid.

Perhaps I ought to make it plain at the start that I conceived an enormous affection and respect for the society of the United States. It is possible that it will in fifty or a hundred years produce one of the great civilizations of the world. My critical comments, and there will be many in the remarks that follow, are those of an admirer. Perhaps I might even, before I begin my analysis, try to explain what it was about American society that fascinated me and filled me with affection and, it is not too much to say, a certain intoxication.

The moral sensibilities of Americans have received many shocks in recent years on disclosures of misbehaviour in the worlds of entertainment, labour, and government. The discovery that ethical practices were no better in some of the most highly regarded of the large corporations gave public opinion a far heavier jolt. In February 1961 Judge Ganey, in the Federal court at Philadelphia, pronounced sentence on the leading corporations in the electrical manufacturing industry and their executives found guilty of violating the antitrust laws. He imposed fines totalling $1,924,500 and handed down seven jail sentences and twenty-four suspended jail sentences. Never before had so many highly placed business executives been marched off to jail. By the usual standards they were good men, most of them family men, pillars of church and community, who had won success by years of hard work. Among those who went to jail was George Burens, father of a family of four children, whose career to this point had been another Horatio Alger story. He had risen to a vice presidency in the General Electric Company with annual compensation of $127,000 from his first position with the company at age fifteen as a stockroom boy paid 33 cents an hour.

Corporate failure, though less dramatic than individual failure, was perhaps more unexpected. Just a few months before the grand jury began its investigations, the chairman of the board of General Electric had testified before the Kefauver subcommittee that his company was pursuing a vigorous policy of compliance with the laws and quoted a distinguished jurist who ranked General Electric as the No.

Stanley Spencer has left it on record how in 1916, among the miseries and the friendlessness of a military hospital in Bristol, he was suddenly aware of someone who, ‘like a Christ visiting Hell’, came walking down a stone passage towards him: ‘a young intellectual named Chute’. In April 1940, a few months before his own death, Eric Gill wrote in his Autobiography: ‘of Father Desmond I shall say little because my love for him is too intimate, too much a matter of daily companionship and discussion and argument, too close a sharing of life and work and ideas and doubts and difficulties - the only man and therefore the only priest with whom I have been able to talk without shame and without reserve.’ Ezra Pound, no blind admirer of the clergy, was present at Father Desmond’s funeral. It falls to me to offer some coherent account of this remarkable man, perhaps the most widely gifted of all English priests of his own time, yet one who through accidents of circumstance remained comparatively unknown. It is easy to gather recollections of him; it is hard now to convey to a younger generation the things he stood for.

He was born at Bristol on September 11,1895, a collateral descendant of William Charles Macready, the Shakespearian actor whose surname was his own second name; his family had kept links with the stage, and still owned the Prince’s Theatre at Bristol. In 1906 he went to Down- side; brilliant from the first, a classical pupil of Nevile Watts and later Head of the School, he might well have become a scholar of Balliol or of King’s, and this would have pleased both his parents; but in 1912 he chose instead to enter the Slade.

On October the 4th, 1957, the world was startled by the announcement that the Russians had put a satellite, Sputnik I, successfully into orbit. The launching, coupled with the relatively large size of the satellite, caused widespread alarm in the United States. The Americans had already announced their intention of launching a number of small satellites as part of their contribution to the International Geophysical Year, which began in July 1957. Practically the only hint that the Russians intended anything similar was given by an article in a Soviet magazine for Radio amateurs, which in July 1957 asked enthusiasts to prepare receiving systems in the 20 and 40 Megacycle Bands for satellite reception, laid down the form in which observations should be taken, and gave a telegraphic address, Moskva-Sputnik, to which they should be sent. This article passed unnoticed in the West.

Five years later, with more than too successful launchings of satellites and space probes, it is possible to attempt some assessment of the scientific contribution made by these experiments. In some fields it has been very significant, in others disappointingly small, serving mainly to confirm what had already been inferred by indirect methods. The number of spectacular discoveries has been very small indeed.

Sputnik I was a sphere, about 23 inches across, and weighing 184 lbs. Its rocket carrier, weighing four tons, went into the same orbit. It carried two radio transmitters of fairly high power, which continued to transmit for about three weeks. As far as is known, it had no scientific instruments apart from those which monitored conditions inside the satellite, and the only scientific publications resulting from this flight have been those concerned with the satellite path, and the effects of atmospheric drag. Sputnik II, which went into orbit on November 3rd, was heavier and more sophisticated.

The sixth London Film Festival was held as usual in the National Film Theatre at the end of last October, but on a wet day it looked and felt more like the Western Front in 1916 than the South Bank in 1962. The demolition around the Royal Festival Hall had to be seen - and heard - to be believed. Nothing, however, could damp or deafen the enthusiasm of the crowds who wished to see the films so briefly available to them; during the fifteen days of the Festival just over twenty-one thousand people paid to see the thirty feature films and fifty shorts presented in the framework of the fortnight, and a full house stayed the whole course of an all-night show on the first Friday. This was a marathon indeed: four feature films - Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Gregoretti’s I Nuovi Angeli and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water - were shown between 11.30 p.m. and 8.15 a.m. the next morning, with intervals for hot soup and other refreshments; one can well beheve they were needed.

Of the films new to me which I was able to see during the festival two stood out head and shoulders above the rest, though I am ready to be persuaded that they might have had close competition from two which I did not catch - Commare Seca and Les Oliviers de la Justice: but my two winners were the Polish Knife in the Water and the Italian II Mare. No one who saw Two Men and a Wardrobe is likely to have forgotten it; this brilliant, imaginative and enigmatic short was made by Roman Polanski as a technical exercize while he was still a student at the Lodz state film school.