In the whole vast field, of the social sciences, there can hardly be a more neglected subject than the sociology of Catholicism, that is to say, the study of the structure and of the life-processes of the Catholic Church, with the means and methods usually applied by sociologists to other societies or associations. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The Catholic Church is an organization to which it seems well-nigh impossible to assume an objective and unprejudiced attitude. To the classical Protestant she is the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse, the devil’s most dangerous death-trap; to the atheist, whether liberal or communist, she is the main bar to progress, a hateful anachronism; to the Catholic she is a dear mother, and indeed the very Body of Christ. In so far as sociology is a scientific pursuit, a pursuit of the truth without favour or disfavour, the Church of Rome must be one of the most difficult objects to handle. Nevertheless, it is and remains surprising that she has never been properly studied by sociologists. After all, even the Protestant and the atheist cannot close their eyes to the fact that she is in all probability both the oldest and the most numerous social body in our western civilization, and even the Catholic cannot gainsay the fact that if she is the Gate of Heaven, she is necessarily at the same time a human society, showing human, even secular, aspects besides her religious and transcendent traits—aspects which are no less worthy of attention than the others.

It is curious how the leadership of the musical world has passed from one country to another. This is not always merely the result of fashion or of social causes: it really does appear that the muses are migratory. The commanding influence exerted by any country at one time has tended to swamp or, to change the metaphor, at least obscure the native art of others. One has only to think of the tremendous impact of Italian, and later of German, music in this country to realize this. So complete and far-reaching has the predominance been on occasion that an appearance of a truly international musical style has been given. This was never more clearly true than in the eighteenth century, when the process was aided by a social and aristocratic internationalism. Nevertheless, every nation has a characteristic musical tradition of its own, even though the tradition may sometimes only be traced with difficulty, being continued by a host of minor, forgotten composers. Thus, even in eighteenth-century England, which is popularly regarded as a locus classicus of a trough in a musical tradition, there were composers such as Boyce who spoke in unmistakably English accents.

What it is that causes and perpetuates national characteristics is a matter for conjecture. Rousseau attributed it to the influence, via song, of language; but, though there may be some truth in this, it is certainly an inadequate explanation. It is more important to give some account of what is meant by a national tradition, lest the cynic should suspect mere jingoism or an attempt to excuse second-rate music.

Against the general background, which we attempted to outline in a previous article, it is now possible to fill in with greater detail the main elements of the Catholic approach to truth in contrast with the Anglican appeal to sound learning; and this with no controversial intention, but with the eirenic aim, not indeed of resolving the contrast, but at least of showing it less in caricature, and in truer proportions and balance. The true following of Christ, in whatever Christian allegiance it is found, is the result of a union, intimate and ineffable, between two persons; a human person and the Person of Jesus Christ, God made man.

This union begins in the supernatural life of grace received in Baptism. It cannot spring from any power innate in human nature; it is wholly given. There comes a time to all who receive this gift when its purpose, the love of God in Christ, is consciously apprehended. The inmost self-hood is confronted by Christ, who is either rejected, or accepted in the obedience and love of divinely given faith. Where explicit knowledge of his person is absent the encounter would seem to be implicit in what conscience presents as good. The union so completed varies in intensity in each person. In some for a whole lifetime obedience is fitful and love lukewarm; the gift does not grow beyond an inchoate stage. In others it fructifies in a union of deep and perfect friendship. Once embraced it is never wholly lost except by an act of deliberate rebellion which theologians call mortal sin.

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.

It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses in nature, of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused”; as systematic silence, leading, sometimes, to hints of an obscure knowledge.’

Recent protests against the publication of ‘obnoxious matter’ in the pages of certain newspapers have done little more than echo what the General Council of the Press had already said on this subject. At one of its earliest meetings— last October—the Council declared itself to be ‘deeply concerned by the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers and periodicals’, and placed on record its view that ‘such treatment is calculated to injure public morals’ and is contrary, to the standards of journalism which the Council is duty-bound to maintain.

Strong words! But verbal condemnation by itself is insufficient. The Press Council is a voluntary body representing newspaper proprietors, editors and working journalists. It has no statutory powers. Its apparent inability to do anything effective to improve matters raises anew, for the individual pressman, the whole question of journalistic responsibility.

Strangely enough, the Royal Commission on the Press (1947-49) had little to say on this subject of the unwholesome exploitation of sex, being concerned rather with cases of alleged political bias and of inaccurate reporting. What it did say, however, was often sound, and should be recalled. Sensationalism, for instance, it described as ‘partly an extreme manifestation of the peculiar values reflected in the popular newspapers, partly a desire to provide the excitement which the reader is believed, and has beat taught, to expect’. And this, as one witness expressed it, is done by publishing prominent and detailed reports of crime, of lie relations between the sexes, and of extraordinary or scandalous behaviour, which ‘minister... to the imaginative gratification of the reader’.

This is an important book. For beginning with this ejaculation from the litany of ‘blurb’ writers I have a reason; it is to underline at the outset the fact that whatever disagreements one may have with Mr O’Donnell, his book marks the first serious and detailed attempt to consider the issues raised by the remarkable group of contemporary novels which have been written by Catholics. One avoids, carefully, labelling the group, although it is clear they possess a certain unity. Maria Cross (the title is named after a Mauriac character) in offering the first account of this aspect of contemporary fiction raises the fundamental questions: what is the relationship between ‘belief’ and fiction; in what way does ‘belief’ modify and colour the sensibility of an individual writer; is it possible for the Catholic novelist to take over Maritain’s dictum, namely to have compassionate understanding of the sinner without collusion with the sin? The general impression that Mr O’Donnell’s book leaves is that he sides with Newman rather than Maritain, for whom literature was ‘the Life and Remains of Natural Man, innocent or guilty’. I say ‘general impression’ advisedly because Mr O’Donnell works for the major part of his book in terms of particular novels and novelists, and consequently such generalized dicta never become explicit. There is no affinity in approach between Maria Cross and Art and Scholasticism.

The first attempts in the realm of worker education in the United States were made by Father Paul Dietz, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, more or less at the same time as Father Plater, S.J., was laying the foundations for the Catholic Social Guild in England. In 1910 he started to organize the scattered activities of individual Catholics in the fields of social education and action. He was spurred on by the hostile attitude of a number of Catholics to the American Federation of Labour (AFL), an association of craft unions headed by Samuel Gompers, and so with a group of Catholic AFL officials he founded the Militia of Christ for Social Services. The object of the Militia was to prevent socialist influence from increasing in the unions and to combat the ‘integrist’ Catholics who would have condemned the AFL out of hand. In the following year the Social Service Commission of the American Federation of Catholic Societies was formed with Father Dietz as its secretary, and with its growth the Militia gradually declined. In 1920 came the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the peace-time successor of the National Catholic War Council, set up by the American bishops to minister to general Catholic life in the U.S.A. They appointed as head of its Department of Social Action Mgr John A. Ryan, who had been the author of the progressive ‘Bishops’ Programme of Social Reconstruction’ published in 1919.

Until the depression of the 1930’s most of the social study and social action of Catholics in the U.S.A. was stimulated, encouraged and initiated by the Social Action Department under Mgr Ryan’s dynamic leadership.

A Poem provides an enclosed domain for investigation, challenging the critic to discover how it is constructed, how its formal structure is related to the complex effect it gives, how metrical means are related to poetic ends. Although kinship of form provides the critic with a positive basis for comparison in the treatment of different poems, the emphasis seems now to have shifted from the study of a poem’s shared and inherited qualities to the study of what is distinctive or typical of the age in which it is written; as a result, little attention is paid to the diversity of poetic forms—distinct, vital and active in themselves—working in the minds of many different poets independently, towards the same kind of poetic result.

Yet the fixed poetic forms and prescribed measures have a sort of philosophic beauty of their own. The poet must commit his feelings to their determination within some chosen form. The nature of his material sets a problem to be solved, and the solution is the poetic ordering of that material: he will, therefore, imagine each effect in relation to the technical means necessary for its accomplishment, by so distributing his rhymes, for example, that the emphasis derived from rhyme in one part is exactly neutralized by a similar concentration upon another.

The subject-matter of a poem exercises a remote control over the poet’s choice of words, and its form an immediate control, the metrical scheme tightening the interpretation of the grammar. Words have certain degrees of elevation in the scale of language.

Elizabeth Simpson was born at Standingfield in 1753. Her parents were Catholic gentry-yeomen of Suffolk, whose simple way of life did not satisfy Elizabeth’s ambitious spirit. Growing up to be intelligent and attractive, she also suffered from an impediment of speech, the desire to conquer which probably inspired her to seek a living in that profession least suited to a stammerer—the stage. Eventually, she ran away from home and arrived in London—‘that perilous town’, as she later described it, ‘which has received for centuries past . . . the bold adventurer of every denomination’. As a distinct adventuress she was attracted by the glamour of the metropolis, but she soon learned that there was a seamier side. It is surprising that so attractive, so innocent and so penniless a girl, always ready for a flirtation, should have survived these perilous weeks unscathed. However, she found security quite soon by marrying a provincial actor called Inchbald, also a Catholic, who died a few years later in 1779. She had already joined a travelling repertory company, and shared its never very prosperous fortunes, but unlike the rest of her female companions, she learned, observed and hoped. She had begun a novel; but in 1784 she had the great joy of seeing her first play accepted and produced with great success before a London audience. The hard years were over and Mrs Inchbald’s career had begun.

For the next two decades, hardly a year passed in which a new play by Mrs Inchbald was not performed.

One of the most striking manifestations of the underlying unity of all knowledge is the way in which a discovery in one branch of science often finds fruitful application in another. A recent example of this is the development by Professor Libby in America of a new method of dating archaeological samples using the techniques of nuclear physics. The basic fact underlying the method is that all archaeological specimens containing carbon also contain a small amount of radioactive carbon, or radiocarbon, which becomes progressively less in quantity as time goes on. The fraction of radiocarbon present can be measured, and hence the age of the sample deduced. To explain this in more detail, it is necessary to explain what is known as the carbon cycle and then to discuss some of the radioactive transformations which take place in the earth’s atmosphere.

The chemical element carbon, which plays an essential part in all vital processes, continually takes part in a cyclic series of interchanges between the earth and its atmosphere. Plants obtain the carbon they need to grow by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and, with the aid of sunlight, build up complex chemical compounds containing carbon by the process known as photosynthesis. Some carbon is also absorbed by roots from the soil, where it is present as a weak solution of carbonic acid. When a plant dies it is often burned, and the complex compounds are broken up and the carbon returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Religious thought and feeling in the West have never, for a reason which will become apparent, evolved so direct and satisfying a symbol of divine activity in the world as that of Shiva dancing. Those who are even slightly conversant with the iconography of this Hindu god will recognize that, whether we find him represented in the wild, destructive dance which expresses his purgatorial power, as in the seventh-century stone-carvings of Kanchi, or in the gracious pas seul of the later bronzes, where his primitive force has been confined within the flowing rhythms of an exquisite art-object, here at least we are faced with the embodiment of an experience of the universe which is prior to all commentary. Our ability to recognize this fact is, however, the most immediate and sufficient proof that the experience as such is not the peculiar property of the peoples of India. I do not know whether it has ever been suggested that St Augustine’s De Musica may be considered as a fully developed treatise on this theme, perhaps even unique in its kind, but I propose in the following pages to present it in this way. Certainly I myself have found that with the representations of Shiva as an imaginative support, many of the more hidden connections in a work which involves not a few obscurities become psychologically intelligible, and that what might be judged to be a dialogue of purely antiquarian interest assumes a quite contemporary importance. As the divine activity in the world takes more than one form, so Shiva has more than once dance, and at first sight it is difficult to convince oneself that the hostile destroyer and the wholly sympathetic performer of a dance which is pure delight are figures of one and the same god.

Having heard that some persons involved in ‘muddled marriages’ thought they could find a justification for their condition in an article written by my English confrere, Father Gerald Vann, O.P., and had so quoted it to their parish priests, I am reminded of the old story of the prisoner at the bar who at the question of the Court: ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ promptly replied: ‘Your Honour, I always thought myself to be guilty; but after listening to my lawyer’s plea I am beginning to wonder if I did any wrong’. The accused was misled by his counsel’s speech, and those Catholics have been misled by Fr Vann’s article.

In each case, the source of the error lies in a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding over who is being addressed. The plea of the counsel for the defence was addressed to the court, and Father Vann’s paper was addressed to the clergy. The defendant thought his lawyer was speaking to him; and the Catholics in ‘bad marriages’ thought that Fr Vann was writing to them.

St Thomas, in drawing a comparison between a judge and a lawgiver, shows that the latter is in much the better position in that he deals with human actions as future, while the former must deal with them as present; towards that which is present one is easily moved by love or hate, whereby one’s judgment becomes vitiated.

The Italians are used to visitors. Once over the Alps, as the train runs down to Turin or Milan, you are in a country that is vividly different from every other, but which nothing from outside ever seems to surprise. Italy, after all, has been civilized longer than any land to the north or west of her; and though many centuries have passed since Europe was governed from Rome, she has remained in a sense the continent’s centre of gravity, if only as the common focus of historical memories. Is she the world’s most visited country? At any rate the foreigner has been coming here since Rome was Rome: pilgrims, priests and conquerors, students, soldiers and tourists, marching up and down the peninsula, roaming, ravaging, ridiculing and revering it. If countries can be revered, there is only one more reverend than Italy. Yet politically she had no national existence until less than a hundred years ago, and has not had a very secure one since. She achieved national unity too late (apart from other considerations) seriously to rival other western nations in the political field, and the fall of Fascism only confirmed this situation. Obviously, the greatness of Italy has little to do with political or military power: indeed her historical achievement, her culture, is not national in the sense that English, French, Spanish or even German culture is national. It has never been centred in one capital or one court.

In an interesting recent study of Manzoni, Mr Bernard Wall notes this cultural regionalism of Italy, together with another effect of the absence of a strong national focus.

During the past year, the B.B.C. has broadcast about fifty religious television programmes. Of these, twelve were major ‘outside broadcasts’ from churches, and the rest were from the studio. Catholics contributed six programmes: Pontifical High Mass from Leeds Cathedral; the Easter Vigil from Clifton Cathedral; Evening Service with Benediction from St James’, Spanish Place; the Westminster Passion Play Behold the Man and Talks from the studio by Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mr Frank Sheed. Before last year we had contributed Solemn Mass from St Denis, Paris, and some half-a-dozen other programmes, including an Evening Service from St Chad’s, Birmingham, Stations of the Cross, the Christmas Crib and an illustrated Talk. All these broadcasts have been largely experimental. Comments and the reaction of viewers have been most carefully observed, and we are by no means yet clear in our minds as to the best way in which Television can serve the Catholic Apostolate.

B.B.C. policy in religious television is identical with that in sound broadcasting which has been publicly stated more than once. Perhaps the clearest statement was made by the then Director General, Sir William Haley, in a speech to the British Council of Churches in November 1948. Dealing with the question whether the B.B.C. was neutral where Christian values were concerned, he said: ‘Of course it is not. There are many demands of impartiality laid upon the Corporation, but this is not one of them. We are citizens of a Christian country, and the B.B.C.— an institution set up by the State—bases its policy upon a positive attitude towards the Christian values.

Garthewin is the name of one of the most gracious of Welsh houses, but by this it has come to mean even more for the life of Wales. For here, serenely set in the hills and looking down to the vale of Elwy, a Georgian mansion, with all its privilege of place, has become a centre for the Welsh theatre. In 1937, Mr Robert Wynne, the owner of Garthewin, decided to convert a bam on his estate into a little theatre. The barn itself was built about 1770 of undressed stone, but within it had two remarkable features—a pair of brick arches—which lent themselves to the perfect adaptation of a simple building into a place where plays could be worthily, and audibly, performed. One arch forms the proscenium, and the theatre itself can accommodate about two hundred people. At Christmas it is the setting for the celebration of Midnight Mass.

To begin with, Garthewin was used for occasional performances by amateur companies. It is not easily reached, and its immediate audience is drawn from the villages and scattered farms nearby. But at once its autonomy as a theatre, free from the irrelevant associations of chapel vestries and village halls where plays are generally only a means of raising funds for some local cause, gave a new seriousness to Welsh drama. Experimental plays and translations of European classics found a home at Garthewin, and the theatre, lying in the very shadow of the mansion, seemed to symbolize the emergence of the Welsh drama as the new inheritor of that unbroken cultural tradition which is the glory of Wales.