On the 16th March, 1902, Emilia Emaldi was delivered of her second child and, to her great joy, a son. Her friends had previously told her to prepare the long robe as he would be a priest. The thought gave her much pleasure as it was her dearest wish to give a son to the priesthood.

At this time, the family lived in S. Lorenzo near Lugo in the beautiful province of Ravenna in north-east Italy. Three years later they moved to the ancient seaport of Ravenna, but with the entry of Italy into the war in 1915 the heavy bombing forced them to return to Lugo. They suffered great hardship, and the father, Francesco Emaldi, was forced to work at anything which came his way in order to make a living.

The boy, who had been christened Alfeo, was nervous and naughty. He adored his father, whom he always obeyed promptly, but although he loved his mother dearly he behaved badly towards her.

Few things would have surprised, or indeed amused, Father Paul Nevill more than that someone should think it suitable to write about him in the pages of The Life of the Spirit. And that is a clue to the sort of man he was. During his thirty years as Headmaster at Ampleforth, Father Paul met many thousands of persons, very few of whom will not have been struck by the impact of his personality. He has been called the greatest of modern headmasters. Certainly it is true that his prestige not only among the senior officials of the Ministry of Education but also among his fellow members of the Headmasters’ Conference was very great. Yet his position as Headmaster of Ampleforth had little to do with the influence he attained. With his fine presence-great height, magnificent head, and natural grace—he was made for fame; but natural gifts of themselves achieve little the union in him of grace and nature that won him the unique place that was his in the educational world of this country.

The possession of an immortal soul opens up such wonderful possibilities to man that a thinker, over- whelmed by the greatness of life, once exclaimed: ‘However great things a man would say about the meaning of life, he would always say too little.’

These marvellous possibilities begin to be realized as soon as a soul is received into the bosom of the Church. ‘O marvel of Baptism', a convert joyfully exclaims. ‘If only we had faith, we should be wrapped in joy whenever we assist at a Baptism, if we remember the spiritual greatness of the neophyte, who becomes the living tabernacle of the Holy Ghost.’

All without exception can happily become temples of the Divine Spirit; in everyone the consoling word of Christ can be fulfilled: The Father and I will come and take up our abode in him.’

Isn't it pleasing to God that my prayer should be just simply Thy Will be done'? But our Lord did not only tell us to treat God like a father who will change his mind; he emphasized it by the story of a woman who asked for bread and was refused, and went on asking, and at last, because she went on asking, she got it. Of course God does not change his mind; but there is something in us that corresponds to that. Every time you pray to God for something, you are equivalently asking him to change his mind.

Ask yourselves, would it really be pleasing to a father or mother if their children never asked them for anything? They want to be asked! Otherwise it would seem their children were lacking in affection for them. I expect it is the perpetual burden of mothers’ and fathers’ lives to be asked again and again. Well! God, Var Father, wants to be asked.

For the last twelve years there has been increasingly engaged in France a great new labour-a gigantic labour, indeed, to make both more human and more holy the great, grey, hidden world of the chronically ill or disabled. It began very simply in 1942 when a group of invalid girls met a certain invalid priest at another girl's bedside. There indeed was the archetypal idea, the gathering together in charity and friendliness of the isolated sick, with the hope of priestly instruction in their common and difficult vocation.

The movement of the Catholic Fellowship of the Sick is now fully organized in several dioceses and has the full and formal approval of the hierarchy. Its manifesto is apparently the little book of Fr Thierry-d'Argenlieu, O.P., who, chronically ill himself, is one of the leader of the movement.

There exists an enormous new world of the sick, declares Fr d'Argenlieu, partly as a result of war conditions and poor housing, but more due to the advance of medicine. ‘A heild has been brought into being', he says, ‘that used not to exist when both people's vitality was greater and when mortality was higher, too.'