Early European travellers among savage peoples generally related that they had little or no religion. Anthropological writers often give the impression that they have little else. This contrast is, of course, to some extent accounted for by the great increase in knowledge about these peoples, but it is also due to a wider definition in modern times of what may be regarded as a religious fact. If the early traveller found among a people nothing corresponding to what he himself had been brought up to regard as religion he was prone to report that they had no religion, only some superstitions. As, however, the definition of religion was extended by anthropologists to cover ancestor cults, totemic observances, fetishism, and even magic and witchcraft, the part played by religious conceptions in the simpler societies received greater emphasis. The widening of the definition would seem to be due in part to changes in our own intellectual atmosphere. The early explorers were Christians. The early anthropologists were not. For the explorers had religion and the savage had not. But the positivism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, associated in most people’s minds with the name of Comte, had had so strong an influence that the positions tended to become reversed in anthropological theories from the middle of last century till well into the present one. Since it was then held that religion is a way of thinking characteristic of the earliest phase of human development, savages had to be portrayed as totally lost in its darkness. Sir James Frazer, speaking of primitive religion, asserted that ‘the life of the savage is saturated with it’. Lévy-Bruhl declared that ‘the reality in which primitive peoples move is itself mystical’.

In a previous Blackfriars article the development of the attitude of the Holy See to the Ecumenical Movement, during thirty years, was traced in outline. This development has followed marked changes in the nature and aims of the movement itself, and these have enabled the Holy See, while still remaining aloof from ecumenical organisation, to encourage the Catholic episcopate in fostering its own ‘reunion’ work on ecumenical lines, in close touch with the movement. The principles of a Catholic ecumenism, with necessary safeguards against the dangers to be met with in their application, are embodied in the Instruction to local ordinaries on the Ecumenical Movement, issued in December 1949 by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. This document is a charter and guide for Catholics in the work of promoting the unity of Christendom among our own countrymen.

The purpose of the present article is to discuss, tentatively and by way of suggestion, the lines of action by which Catholic ecumenical work could be applied to the religious situation in England today. Between Catholics and their non-Catholic countrymen who are professing Christians, there lies a formidable psychological barrier; a barrier which keeps in being distorted ideas of the doctrines that divide Christendom, and hinders the realisation by non-Catholics of the direction in which true Christian unity lies. The aim of Catholic ecumenism is to work, from our side, for the removal of this psychological barrier by the same methods and in the same spirit with which the non-Catholic ecumenists are working from theirs. The non-Catholic ecumenist may object that this is not, and cannot be, true ecumenical work, but is rather the proselytising spirit of Catholicism in borrowed clothes. True ecumenism, he would say, renounces convert-making and aims only at promoting corporate growth towards truth, in each separate tradition, until the day when all achieve a common unity in Christ.

In every age, even in the centuries called Christian, believers have had to lament the infidelities of men. That is a grief which concerns, most of all, our own individual souls. But the lawyer and the statesman are concerned with institutions, and with the fact that these institutions have been Christian for centuries and have ceased to be so in our time. Christian lawyers and statesmen should feel a tremendous responsibility for this decline of Christian standards in their own generation. They cannot be consoled by the sort of sophistry which suggests that Christian institutions are impossible; that to talk about them only betrays an external view and an unspiritual outlook; that there may be more genuine Christianity in the souls of a few human beings in a so-called unchristian age than in all those celebrated centuries of Christian culture, and that it is only this true Christianity in some individual souls which really matters.

There is one institution, however, which is so closely connected with the very essence of human personality that nobody should venture to call it external; namely, matrimony. And there have been two fundamental changes in it during the last four or five centuries: one that dates back to the Reformation and one that is a specific development of our own time.

Why was it that Simone Weil, with her intense desire for the truth at all costs, with her love of God, of Christ crucified and of the Mass, was yet kept outside the Church and died without receiving baptism? The answer to this question is to be found partly in the letters which she wrote to Father Perrin, the Dominican, and which were published in an earlier book, Waiting on God, and more definitely in the Letter to a Priest, which she wrote from New York a year before her death. It is not merely a personal question, because Simone Weil, though more intense in the ardour of her desire for truth and more uncompromising in its pursuit than anyone, perhaps, in our time, was yet typical of a whole generation of those who are apparently estranged from the Church or from any form of organised Christianity. She expresses the position both of herself and of many others in the opening words of the letter: ‘When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of Mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine. . . .’ She then goes on to enumerate all the reasons which keep her from the Church, about which, she says, ‘I have been thinking . . . for years with all the intensity of love and attention of which I am capable’.

Our age may have many defects but it also has its virtues. One of them is a resolute search for authenticity, for the real and the genuine. This has shown itself in various ways, among which we can number the ‘return to original sources’, urged so long ago by Leo XIII. The revival of biblical scholarship in the last sixty years and the increasing and widespread practice among the laity of reading the Bible are among the most reassuring signs of the Church’s vitality at the present day. But a growing familiarity with the word of God is accompanied by a realisation of the difficulties that lie in wait for the ordinary reader. Higher Criticism is no longer the menace it was, but most of us carry about, as the familiar furniture of our minds, vague reminiscences of what the critics have said, so that when we read the Pentateuch we are aware that it has been carved up into four, if not more, sources and that R (or even R 1, 2, 3), is said to be the author rather than Moses. When we read the lovely oracles of the second part of Isaiah we remember that obscure Germans have taught that they were written by a committee and that they are prophecies post eventum. Compared with these matters, the standing still of the sun for Joshua, or whether Jonah was or was not eaten by a whale or by another as yet zoologically unverified sea-monster, are comparatively easy questions.