The Twentieth Century is witnessing the rapid growth and development of two world-wide movements within the Catholic Church — the Liturgical Movement and Catholic Action. The close connexion between these two movements is not always appreciated, for both of them have been considerably misunderstood. The authentic Liturgical Movement is not just a rampage for quilismas and outsize chasubles; nor is authentic Catholic Action just a drive for Clean Films, still less a pretext for an intensified campaign of what has been called ‘ecclesiastical ballyhoo.’

On closer acquaintance it will be found that both these movements are instinct with the same idea—the renewal and increase of active participation by the laity in the life and work of the Church, the utilization to the full of the power conveyed by the Character of Baptism and, especially, of Confirmation. The chief objective of the Liturgical Movement is active lay participation in the Church’s worship; it is a revolt from the lamentable state of things which tended to make the layman little more than a passive spectator of the public worship of God. in favour of a return to the corporate congregational worship of the primitive Church. Catholic Action is formally and authoritatively defined by the Holy Father as (active) lay participation in the apostolate of the Hierarchy. It may be regarded as a revolt from the tendency to consider the layman as existing to be ministered unto but not to minister, a reaffirmation of his right and duty to take an active part in the Church’s official mission of salvation.

We are all familiar with a number of societies and associations which pursue their peculiar missions under the guidance of the Church. There are the Confraternities and Third Orders which promote self-sanctification, there are the works for the formation of the young; others which, like the S.V.P., provide material assistance to the poor, while the Guilds are concerned with professional interests. Lastly there are the societies concerned with larger questions of propaganda and defence of principles, such as the Catholic Truth Society, Catholic Evidence Guild and Catholic Social Guild. They all play an invaluable part in the life of the Church, and they depend upon the laity for success. They all aim more or less directly at the spiritual welfare of souls. So it would seem that they must be entitled to consider themselves part of Catholic Action since this is, according to the Pope’s definition, ‘nothing other than the participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy.’ To question this may at first sight seem excessively punctilious. But when it is seen that the distinction between the strict use of the term and its haphazard bestowal can and should be made it will, perhaps, be used with more caution than has been the case hitherto. If Catholic Action is to prove itself other than a new name for ‘the old firm’ or a fresh panacea such as our economists favour some little care will have to be used by responsible authorities.

I write, first, as one of the ‘young people ‘ to whom the advocates of Catholic Action seem especially to appeal and, secondly, as a provincial.

What exactly is happening in this Catholic Action campaign?

Now and then, at the invitation of devoted men, a lecturer from London or Liverpool descends to harangue us on Catholic Action or to show us some phase of its workings. Who are ‘us’? A group of people representing 1 in 1,000 of the available Catholic population, rising half-a-dozen times a year under the stimulus of a dinner or a dance to 25 in 1,000 and once each year, at a Sunday evening cinema-hall Rally, to 100 in 1,000. And of this weekly or fortnightly band, Apostolic in its diminutiveness at least, who are the regular components? A few married women, a few teachers, a few working-girls; to four of these add one man —a clerk, a plumber, a custom-officer or an out-of-work.

Now, when the lecturer has departed, what in the main is the idea left uppermost in the minds of the hearers of the word? During the lecture they have been galvanized and uplifted by the nobility of the appeal; inspired with generosity, they have been impelled towards the brink. But, as the words which pass betwen them show, when they endeavour to plunge from that brink of noble principles into the complexities of direct action in their own private lives and spheres of existence, they are partly perplexed and partly dispirited.

One day near the beginning of June Mr. Shane Leslie, in a letter to The Times, compared the Irish to the English as professional politicians to amateurs. It is a pleasing conception, the Mother of Parliaments retaining her amateur status, bringing with it a vision of a leisured and stately autonomy. At the same time there is something very admirable and winning about the continuous enthusiasm for politics that certain peoples display. But the admiration we English accord them seems to me to be that which we give to a child who is clever at his play. For a whole people to be politically effective, that was possible in the city-states of Hellas, it was the ideal of Rousseau, but, so we are told, it is out of the question in the modern nation State. We mark our ballot papers, having for the most part but the vaguest ideas of the particular issues at stake, and thus is the voice of the people heard; then and only then. But can this be really all? Are those only to be reckoned politicians who sit at Westminster or nurse constituencies? I do not believe it for a moment. The more benefits are conferred on us by the legislature, the more will our interests lie with it; and the more closely we seem to be entwined in the net of economic circumstance, the more we shall look to it for help and guidance.

The Holy Father’s ideas concerning Catholic Action have not always been fully understood or exactly interpreted. This is especially true with regard to the relations between Catholic Action, as he envisages it, and the Catholic Social Movement which traces its origin to Leo XIII. It has even been asserted that there is a difference, not to say divergence, between the thought of the two Popes, and that Catholic Action is to supersede the Catholic workers’ organizations, which, it is maintained, have become infected with the materialism they set out to combat, and have, although rejecting class war, brought into the Catholic community a principle of class division inimical to unity among Catholics. On this view, Catholic Action, universal and spiritual, comes as a happy substitute for the social movement inaugurated by Leo XIII.

Others, themselves involved in the workers’ organizations, are apt to consider social action as the highest if not the only form of Catholic Action, forgetting that the term has been given by Pius XI a specific technical meaning which, if not entirely new, conveys a new significance—’ the participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church.'

If we seek for the origins of the term ‘Catholic Action,’ it cannot be denied that there is continuity between the thought of the last five Popes. Pius IX on various occasions called for action from Catholics; Leo XIII exhorted at once to Christian social democratic action and to Catholic action;

‘Make him a farmer,’ used to be the hopeful proposal for the difficult member of the family. It was really a compliment to the oldest of the civilized professions—that farming might do for him what other occupations could not. In general, however, it must be recognized that settling on the land requires qualities of character all too rare and that the agricultural labourer, dull though he may appear to those who do not know him, must possess a resourcefulness of varied skill and knowledge beyond comparison with wage-earners in other trades. The Catholic land movement in the different phases of its development must call for men and women of at least average human qualities. It is to be hoped, however, that in due time its enthusiasts will find themselves able to give some attention to the value of the land as giving training and livelihood for young people of the ‘problem’ type. So far as ‘Catholic Action and Unemployables’ are concerned, what follows is purely speculative—a suggestion to the Catholic body, drawn from work done on interdenominational lines by others.

Turner’s Court Farm Training Colony is just off the London road, fifteen miles short of Oxford, in the Chiltern Hills. There are some three hundred colonists, divided among five homes, on a 1,000-acre farm; among them some Catholics, varying in number from twenty to forty. The Colony is governed by the Christian Service Union and provides for lads who are ‘unemployable.’

SINCE the preoccupations of an age are expressed in its current catchwords, it is perhaps not strange that our contemporaries should employ, in every context and without examination, the idiom of pseudo-economics in which is enshrined commercial wisdom. Among the stock phrases which recur in everyday conversations, and which appear to exercise an incantatory power over the minds of those who speak or hear them, ‘the law of supply and demand’ is most frequently evoked; not necessarily because the speaker is intimate with the workings of this mysterious law, but because it is intended to place the discussion, whether moral, political or artistic, upon a wholesome basis of commercial expediency.

Thus it is argued that in the work of the English playwright or novelist there is no scope for Catholic Action, not because of any incompatibility in the activities which it is proposed to combine, but because ‘the public does not want religion; there is no demand for it.’

Before trying the strength of this objection, it will be good to question whether a medium as comparatively frivolous as that in which either the playwright or the novelist works, can be employed in Catholic Action. To do this we must examine the common function of the playwright and novelist, which is to provide the public with a means of living vicariously, projected into an imagined existence, and thus forgetting present circumstances. Where there is great ignorance of the supernatural, such as religious ‘reformation’ has achieved in English-speaking countries, this escape from the apparent harshness of reality must become particularly desirable.

There is a widespread, if inarticulate, misgiving about Catholic Action which needs ventilation and elimination. A particularly vehement layman might express it in some such terms as these :

‘Catholic Action? Ecclesiastical Fascism! A pretext for further encroachment by the clergy on the layman’s business! More clerical domination and interference! More paralysing of lay initiative and endeavour! Apostolate of the Laity! Clerical Gleichschaltung!’

The Englishman, especially, has a horror of being ‘organized.’ And organization, it is universally agreed, is of the very essence of Catholic Action. The adoption and organization of an oeuvre by the Hierarchy is precisely what makes that oeuvre entitled to be called Catholic Action. The local establishment and direction of Catholic Action is committed to the parochial clergy. Must we not then infer that the disgruntled layman is right?

The most effective way to disillusion him would be, perhaps, to take him abroad to countries where Catholic Action is really in action and is already fully organized and vigorous. Failing that, these few considerations may help to shake the prejudices.

All depends on what we mean by ‘organization.’ In the strict sense in which the word is applied to Catholic Action, organization, so far from imposing, excludes uniformity: it fosters rather than hinders individual initiative and enterprise. The point cannot be explained better than in the words of the Holy Father himself.

Organization in general means the unity of many members of which each preserves its own particular nature, functions and life, but which together pursue a common aim and concur in the formation of a single body, itself subordinated to one single vital principle.

He professed his belief in God openly, regarding his religious convictions as a soldier on active service does his uniform, which he wears always and never exchanges for another dress ... In times like these this, so to say, intransigent Christian, can teach us all a lesson.’ In these words an Italian socialist newspaper summed up a student of the University of Turin who died in July, 1925, at the age of twenty-four. The man who made such an impression upon those who did not share his faith was Pier Giorgio Frassati, an engineering student, the son of a former Italian Ambassador in Berlin, an athlete and mountaineer, goodlooking, gay and popular, who, during his short life had made himself so beloved among the poor and among his fellow students that his funeral was something like a pilgrimage.

The life of Frassati is a shining example of that apostolate of the laity which Pius XI calls Catholic Action, and since there is very little literature in English to make clear how Catholic Action works out in practice, those who wish to know more about it cannot do better than read the account of his life, translated from the Italian, which although rather too much abbreviated, gives a vivid picture of a most attractive personality.

Pier Giorgio was essentially of the laity: he had no wish to be a priest or religious. He would have proposed marriage to a girl with whom he was deeply in love, but for the fact that he knew that for some reason she would not be acceptable to his parents, and out of loyalty to them he put the thought aside, at great sacrifice to himself.

I met them five years ago, during the yearly visit south; saw them on several occasions at Bath and Bristol; stayed with them at the Bell in Malmesbury; and for three years spent Christmas at Whitehouse Terrace. With others who knew them, I see in their death an epoch ended.

It was not merely that they had survived from the ‘nineties, not even that they had been at the centre of that society. Each of them in his way had shaped himself to the new age; they read, made friends, and generally lived, with zest, while they kept without display those gifts which they did not see renewed around them—certain courtesies, a certain social sense, certain refinements of understatement. Hence their charm, hence their elusion of many who would have courted them had they taken a conventionally veteran air. When in 1931 Canon Gray published his Poems, the clerical reviews observed that a well-known parish priest had written a book of verse; the secular referred briefly to the modernisms of Mr. Gray. Amateurs of the Yellow Book period were still seeking copies of Silverpoints.

In private they did not discourse on the past, but there were allusions; most often to Beardsley and his sister, sometimes to Pater or Lionel Johnson. If one heard mass at St. Peter’s early in January, one’s prayers were asked for the soul of Paul Verlaine. A chance naming of Dowson permitted me a question on Cynara; it was well received. Yes, she was as Symons had described her; tris gentille; no one saw her much, not Dowson himself. So far one might go; but any plot to elicit a narrative would have been delicately countered.

ENGLISH Catholics are sometimes charged with indifference to the English saints, with looking to Lisieux instead of Rochester or London or Canterbury. It is not my purpose to argue the truth of this complaint; indeed I propose to take it for granted. Certainly there are C.T.S. tract cases where Ste. Therèse sells much better than Blessed Thomas More. And there is a sense in which no one has any right to grumble. A saint is a saint; the better Englishman for being so, but not the better saint for being English. The terms of reference, so to say, are not national, and there are considerable disadvantages about nationalism in hagiology. The elements of sanctity are the same everywhere. Still, it is also true that these elements are expressed differently, take on a different colouring, according to the natural circumstances of the person who manifests them. Grace builds upon nature, and though the saint is no more a saint for being English, yet he need be no less English for being a saint. Hence it is that we rightly find something congenial in saints of our own nation; hence, too, that our own saints are not ignored without loss. The essentials of sanctity are the same in all the saints, but in so stupendous a success everything is of interest. This man, this woman, succeeded in the only success that is really worth having. We watch their actions and ways in the hope of surprising their secret, and inevitably we want to imitate, so far as we can; to emulate, not only in the very heart of the thing, but in methods, habits, practices, whereby that heart was expressed and confirmed.

It is a matter of deep regret to some of us that the Corporative Order, something different from the Corporate State, should have become in the public mind so closely identified with Fascism. Admittedly the corporative organization of industrial life, now in process of being introduced into Italy, Germany and Austria—even in Italy it is still far from being fully developed—is based on Fascist conceptions and implemented in a Fascist spirit. What Catholics, however, should remember is that a corporative organization of industry as an alternative on the one hand to unrestricted competition and free trade and on the other to State intervention, was being discussed by social-minded Catholics on the continent at least half a century ago, long before the centralized Fascist State was dreamed of. The first gropings after the corporative formula go back as early as the days when the Marquis de La Tour du Pin and Count Albert de Mun, appalled by the horrors of the Commune, founded the Catholic Workmen’s Clubs in an attempt to counteract the class war. The immediate reputation of La Tour du Pin, the centenary of whose birth has been celebrated in France this year, was somewhat overshadowed by that of his brilliant oratorical friend, but it is now recognized that his was by far the more constructive mind of the two, and he devoted long years to elaborating a Christian social order on corporative lines, which might ultimately, in his opinion, not only regulate industrial life but replace the parliamentary system.