In a previous article, I pointed out that Frederic Ozanam, the great and saintly founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, had in the course of his lectures on Commercial Law at the University of Lyons in 1839 outlined a remarkable system of Christian social reforms. He had denounced the exploitation of the working classes, which he described as slavery, he called for a just wage, profit-sharing and even pensions—over fifty years before Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. And Ozanam was not the only French Catholic to be moved by the spectacle of working-class misery which grew in intensity with the development of the Industrial Revolution. Conservatives like Villeneuve-Bargemont and Charles de Coux had denounced the evil effects of industrialism, and Royahsts claimed that the plight of the workers was due to the Revolution which had made their exploitation possible by destroying the Guilds of the ancien regime. Other Catholics were influenced by the doctrines of the early Socialist thinkers, such as Saint-Simon and Fourrier. The most notable of these were the group of working men who, under the leadership of Buchez, founded a paper called l’Atelier, some of the pages of which make stimulating and startling reading even today. The vigorous and progressive spirit of this elite of French Catholic social thinkers is best rendered by the Abbe (afterwards Mgr) Maret, the friend and collaborator of Ozanam and Lacordaire, who (before Marx and Proudhon had given to the word ‘socialism’ its materialistic and atheistic connotation) wrote: ‘It is no use refuting the pseudo-socialists, let us become socialists ourselves’.

In recent times no Catholic subject has attracted such widespread attention as the affair of the priest-workers in France. The various phases of the negotiations between the French Hierarchy and the Vatican were widely reported in the English press; in one week the matter was discussed in a leader in the Manchester Guardian, in an article in the New Statesman and in a talk on the Third Programme. Some commentators seemed to see in it an attempt by the Church in France to revolt against the dominance of the Vatican, on the principle that if you scratch a French bishop you find a Gallican; others seemed to feel that the episode revealed the Church (in France as elsewhere) in its true colours as anti-worker; others yet again insinuated that a halt had to be called to the desertions that were taking place from the ranks of the priest-workers to the Communists. Yet to appreciate the recent decisions of the French bishops, the priest-workers must be seen in the context of the whole problem of the Church and the workers in France, and of the worker apostolate which existed long before the experiment of the priest-workers was begun. In other words, the directives issued by the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops to the leaders of worker Catholic Action in October are as significant as the new instructions regarding the position of priest-workers.

The picture is falsified unless the priest-worker is seen as part of the whole worker apostolate and that against the background of the growth of social Catholicism in France.

Few confusions are more common, or more perplexing, today than the confusion between two quite different uses of the word ‘natural’; yet both uses are valid enough if rightly understood; and the distinction between them is a very simple one.

On the one hand, we are always saying, or hearing it said, that this or that action, though not commendable, is ‘natural enough’ or ‘only natural’. It is only natural for people to lose their tempers or their heads sometimes, only natural if occasionally they oversleep or overeat, only natural if sometimes they let this or that passion get the better of them. What does the phrase mean? It means, in effect, ‘only to be expected’. And why is it to be expected? Because that, to use another common phrase, is ‘only human nature’ as we know it. But what is the human nature that we know in everyday experience? It is, in the language of Catholic theology, fallen human nature.

Fallen human nature means human nature, not as it was created by God, not as it was intended to be by God, but as it exists now, warped and twisted by evil. It is not wholly evil, far from it; but the evil tendencies are there, as we all know from our own experience; in our better moments we realize that we ought to be conquering them, integrating the energies which find an outlet in evil actions into the organic unity of the good life; but again and again we fail, or we forget altogether even to try, and then nature-as-we-know-it has its way.

A Catholic always finds a papal audience a thrilling experience and we know how men and women of every race, colour, creed and social station have been moved by the charm, graciousness and penetrating holiness of the present Holy Father. But it was a unique event in the life of a young priest, whose professional studies had synchronized with the first half of the reign of Pope Pius X, to see and hear and kiss the hand of that holy Pontiff as I did in 1912. Even then he was commonly regarded as a saint, as we now know that he was; and to have been in such close contact with a beatified or canonized saint is in itself something to remember for a lifetime.

I can see him now as he entered the large hall where he greeted many hundreds of people. He gave an impression of great age, but still more of extreme weariness. The years of responsibility and of constant strife had taken their toll. No longer was there the splendid physique and optimistic outlook which we recognize in the portrait of the Bishop of Mantua of thirty years earlier. I remember most vividly the tone of his voice and the rather sad and appraising eyes with which he gazed on each of us in turn; his very slow progress round the room; and, as a final impression, his quite different appearance as one glanced into a smaller audience chamber where a very small boy was almost romping about him and tugging at his cassock.

The apologetic defence of the central Anglican position, if the extremes of Anglo-Catholic papalism and Protestant fundamentalism are excepted, finch its final justification in an appeal to sound learning. The formula is Bishop Creighton’s. It was the application of this principle, he maintained, that brought about the changes made in the English Church in the sixteenth century. Not that the Church of England claims a monopoly of learning, but that it owes its present existence to the fact that the theology and devotional life of Western Christendom, of which up to the Reformation it was an integral part, had become overweighted and distorted in its development, and was maintaining an ecclesiastical system that obscured rather than illustrated the vital principles on which the Christian life is founded.

Efforts at reform from within were defeated because the logical fabric of scholastic theology on which it rested was so strong that it was difficult to deal with it in detail; it was hard to see where reform was to begin or where it was to end. Reforming efforts resulted in a sense of hopeless weariness, and at length it became apparent that reform was only possible by returning to the principles of sound learning. It was these principles that were applied during the formative years of the Reformation, not by any one great leader whose personality impressed itself upon the changes that were made, but by the long process of the aspirations which have sprung from these principles, producing by gradual evolution the formularies, and in particular the Prayer Book, from which the Anglican oudook and ethos derive.

It is laid down in Section 4(i) of the Education Act 1944 that ‘there shall be two Central Advisory Councils for Education, one for England and the other for Wales and Monmouthshire, and it shall be the duty of those Councils to advise the Minister upon such matters connected with educational theory and practice as they think fit and upon any questions referred to them by him’.

The Central Advisory Council for Wales has already published three substantial reports: they deal with the future of secondary education in Wales, with county colleges and with The place of Welsh and English in the schools of Wales.This last report, which is the result of two years of hard work, is an impressive volume and its contents merit an extended notice. By nature of its terms of reference, which include ‘the problem of bilingualism in Wales generally’, it is a document of the greatest importance not only for those who are bound to be concerned with education in Wales but also for all who feel any concern for the future of the Welsh nation.

The historical setting of the problem is presented in the first two sections of the Report. The first gives a comprehensive and valuable account of the place of Welsh and English in the schools between 1650 and 1925: the former date marks the foundation of nearly sixty free schools in Wales under the ‘Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel’, and the latter was the year which saw the appointment of the Departmental Committee whose inspiring but as yet, after a quarter of a century, not fully implemented report on Welsh in Education and Life was published in 1927.

Television is the best medium yet discovered for selling goods. That is the opinion of practical men in the United States, the home of commercial television, and it can be backed up by an array of facts and figures showing how the enormous sums of money spent on television advertising justify themselves in the eyes of those whose business it is to sell mass-produced goods.

The same factors that enable television to sell goods enables it also to sell ideas, provided that, like the goods, they are suitable for a mass public. Television is probably not the best medium for spreading original ideas, any more than it is the best medium for selling first editions or vintage port or thoroughbred sires or any other commodity that can be bought only by the few. But for the sort of vague general ideas that make up most people’s everyday thinking, for the habits of thought and standards of value that influence the ordinary man’s life, television has advantages over and above the other forms of mass-communication—print, cinema, radio—and it has access to people who are rarely touched by the still older influence of platform, stage, and pulpit.

Not so long ago, most people in civilized countries viewed the world through the medium of the popular newspaper and the cheap book. Later, this medium was largely displaced by the radio and the films. Now television is showing its power to replace them all as the universal oracle, the social law-giver, the norm-setter, the mirror in which you can see life as it ought to be and as you come to think it is.

In a noble tribute to the late Hilaire Belloc at the Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral last year Monsignor Knox spoke in passing of Father Vincent McNabb—the champion-in-arms and inspiration of Belloc and Chesterton and the brilliant group of Catholics among whom they moved; ‘Father Vincent’, he said, ‘who has left us so little record of his splendid gifts’. Some of us could not help wondering what exactly the preacher meant by that little aside. Was it an appraisement of Father Vincent’s thirty-eight published books and the many pamphlets and articles which he buried in the back numbers of innumerable journals and reviews? Perhaps it only meant that Father Vincent has left us no great massive work of primary importance, accepted as a permanent contribution to knowledge. His acute mind, extraordinary capacity for original thought, and the vital intellectual energy he poured into everything he did would seem to have made such a magnum opus possible. His two earliest books on Faith and Prayer (recently republished in one volume) showed promise that his theological writing might have developed on the highest classical level. Those who knew him may be inclined to say that he was too much the poet and artist to be tied down to technical theology and that anyhow his romantic temperament gave another bent to his genius. But whatever the explanation, although there is so much that is profound, original and stimulating in his published writings, he has left us no full-length, sustained study comparable to one or other of the major works of Cardinal Newman. He has given us no Apologia or Summa.

In an age of conferences the hope of an agreed conclusion most often overshadows the discussion, and the reassurance of public opinion can be a more powerful motive than the painful search for the truth. In July, the third of a series of Conferences being held this year at Spode House, Hawkesyard, on ‘Religion and the Arts’ was devoted to the Christian writer, and if its theme seemed vague it was at least happily free from the larger generalizations. The intention was not to produce a manifesto or to try to resolve the difficulties of a Catholic writer confronted with a world which at so many points rejects the religious and moral premisses that must be his. It was, rather, an opportunity for considering some of the factors in a debate that has suffered from lack of definition, and this was done in a setting of common faith and common life (if only for a few days), for want of which the writer or critic who is a Catholic can feel a special isolation.

Forty people came to the Conference and they represented no one but themselves. For the most part they were either contributors to this journal or critical readers of it; professionally they included university dons, working journalists, students, booksellers, creative writers of (as they would admit) varying degrees of achievement, and priests whose work requires them to be specially concerned with the written word. ‘Religion as the Writer’s Theme’ was the general subject of the lectures and discussions.