In the fortieth annual social week held in Pau, France, this year the subject under discussion was ‘Peace'. There was a brief note in the Denver Register calling attention to a letter of Monsignor Montini, pro-Secretary of State, which said that this examination of the problems of peace by men of faith, thought and action is most timely today when men's souls are more troubled than ever before. Never in human history has greater discord been known. This world-wide dissension invades the daily lives of the people. It feeds and maintains social conflict. Its origins are of an ideological as much as of an economic nature. It eats into the very hearts of families and institutions. Its psychological effects sap the will-power and cloud judgment. Even the flag of peace, unfurled for partisan ends, frequently divides mankind.

Integrity, Integration—such words indicate the needs of our age. They are needs which now affect humanity as a whole. All mankind needs to be integrated into the unity which it potentially is. Failure to achieve this integration involves the danger of destruction of large parts of humanity. St Augustine's definition of peace still holds good. It is ‘the tranquillity of order'.

This problem of integration hinges on another problem of integration, the integration which involves the incarnation of the spiritual life in the material life. Disintegration is the disease of our time, the converse of that specialisation and expertise which to some extent cannot be avoided. Men tend to be divided up into those who try to solve humanity's problems on a spiritual level, who pray about them, and live a relatively secluded life, and on the other hand those men who try to work on a solely material level, who live a relatively active life, working in the social, political, economic and similar spheres.

Since the Fall man has been haunted by the vision of peace, of a state in which the fulfilment of desire would be complete and undisturbed. The longing for peace is as universal as desire itself; for the very idea of desire includes the wish for peace, inasmuch as the full enjoyment of any coveted good can only be ensured by peace. Even wars, as St Thomas points out, are only fought for the sake of peace, in order to bring about conditions more satisfactory than the prevailing ones; while the very restlessness and sensationalism of an age merely indicates that the pursuit of genuine peace has been given up as impossible of fulfilment.

Our Lord unfolds to his disciples the hidden depths of his teaching, and by these words shows how important and helpful it will be to them.

The value of his teaching lies in the peace that it brings to man. In this context, it is as if our Lord were saying: I know well that very soon you will all leave me; but I know that if you really understand my doctrine you will not harden your hearts in desertion. The reason for every thing I have spoken about in my sermon, all that I have taught you throughout the Gospel, is this: that if you do return to me In me you may have peace. For the whole purpose of the Gospel is that we should find peace in Christ alone. ‘Much peace have they that love thy law’ (Ps. 118, 165).

When the Holy Father gave to the Christian world both the Apostolic Constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia and the Motu Proprio Primo Feliciter, it was not to present the Church with something novel in the search for Christian perfection but rather to set the seal of his approval on a form of life, wholly given to God, already being lived by many who, for various reasons, were unable to enter a religious Order or who perhaps felt that a consecrated life in the world gave them greater scope for the exercise of their apostolate. It was natural—and indeed eminently desirable—that some of the attempts at the dedicated life in the world should be grouped around the contemplative Orders—Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans— for the fact that such a life is lived in the world makes whatever contact with a centre of contemplative life is possible all the more valuable and indeed essential.

Both under the Old Dispensation and under the New, God has often used the scourge of war, exile and captivity to summon his people to a renewal of faith, to call them to repentance and conversion. Christians have had to undergo this experience in our own times in Europe and Asia, and accounts of their witness to their faith are reaching us from many quarters. What grace and profit may accrue to the Church from their fidelity and their sufferings we cannot tell: that is in God's hands. But might it not be, also, that in his providential plan for us there is a place for the published records of such experiences, many of them by our separated brethren, which we have not yet learnt to appreciate sufficiently? Perhaps, in one sense, it is too easy to be impressed by the courageous stand of a Faulhaber or a Niemöller; perhaps we are too readily moved by the joy and serenity in the letters of a von Moltke, written from prison, awaiting execution, condemned for the sole reason that he had confessed to placing loyalty to God above that to his Führer.