To treat of the motherhood of the Blessed Virgin according to the Scriptures is as overwhelming a task as it would be to treat of Christ according to the Scriptures. For one whole half of the mystery of redemption, as set forth there, is summed up in the person of the Blessed Virgin. Under Christ, and in Christ, the Blessed Virgin plays in the work of the redemption a companion, complementary part to his; being the Eve to his Adam, the Woman answering to the (Son of) Man that he is. It is accepted that it is necessary, in order to appreciate the Scriptural witness to Christ, to study the Bible as a whole and in its full inspired weight of meaning. The same is true of the Blessed Virgin. It is not sufficient, in the Old Testament, to dwell on a number of the more explicitly prophetic texts, nor in the New Testament on the great scenes, say, of the Annunciation, Bethlehem, Cana, Calvary.

The great need is for a fully common life, within the family, which will make the family of use to the world around it. In past ages the monastic community was the spearhead. Today I feel it is the family, the Catholic family, which is to be the spearhead for Catholic penetration of a pagan world.

To make common life within the family a reality it is necessary to treat the children of the family as persons. I disagree with the saying, ‘Give me a child until it is seven …'. Apart from the mythical child of five who, on being told he had committed a mortal sin, replied: ‘Oh, but I cannot commit a mortal sin yet because I have not got the use of reason', one trains rather than teaches a child of under seven.

As you read that story of St Teresa's life set out by her own hand, in which she describes with extraordinary simplicity and wonderful subtlety that real experience of her own soul in prayer, we see her gradually through life drawing nearer and nearer to God. What strikes one almost beyond her daring and her courage, beyond even, in a way, her love of God, is that throughout every page of that life, surging in her heart and expressed in all she said and wrote, beating through every page of it, there is such a flame of enthusiasm for her faith.

Venerable Fathers, dearest sons and daughters, it is asource of great consolation and joy to Us to see before this impressive gathering of representatives from every continent and from every part of the world, met together here at the very centre of Christianity to celebrate this world Congross on the Lay Apostolate. You have been studying the nature and purpose of this work, you have given much thought to the present state of the world and you are acutely aware of the grave respon sibilities which are upon us of this generation to look to the future. These have been for you days of ceaseless prayer, a time for a searching examination of conscience and, withal, an opportunity to exchange views and experiences.

With the publication in America of the translation of Father Arintero's great work on Mystical Development in the life of the Church and of Dr Greenstock's work on Christian perfection (both from the Herder Book Company of St Louis) a very important and decisive stage in the journey towards the more realistic attitude to the study of mystical theology has been reached. Father Arintero died, a very holy man, in 1928 in Madrid; yet it is, perhaps, only at this point in the development of the study of mystical theology that his full significance can really be understood. It is therefore fortunate that through the devoted labours of Father Jordan Aumann, O.P., this very useful and accurate English translation of Father Arintero's major work has appeared.

Thee God we praise. But to speak of this Godhead I dare not presume, for since I cannot prove, nor conceive thine hid works, that thou hast made in a creature, what should I say to the maker that is a creator? For all philosophers that have laboured in divers sentences, as in grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, all, they proved by reason in their faculties, till they came to one point, that was called, prima causa. And here they stood still and could proceed no further. And that first causer, they said, might well be called a God. And so we, to the same first causer of all things, we say: Te Deum Laudamus. ‘Thee God we praise', that art so curious a maker of diversities of things. And Te dominum confitemur, ‘we knowledge thee', a lord that of everything art so wise a disposer and so noble a keeper.

It might seem as you come out from the great city, from the mighty labyrinth that is spreading across your river, as you pass by the gradually diminishing houses, and face the wide stretch of common, and then turn up the lane, it might seem as though this convent stood symbolically for all convents, as a haven of rest. It might seem as though the waste stretch of land was set there, as though the high walls had been built as a shelter, as though here people might escape from the foes around them, laying aside the noise and bustle, the responsibility and the dreadtulness of human life.

On October 20th, 1946, Marie Thérèse de Soubiran was declared Blessed fifty-seven years after she had died a failure in the eyes of the world and of her rellow Christians. She was another Jeanne d'Arc in whom holiness looked like madness or stupidity and very unlike wholesomeness. Yet she had promised to be the most conventional of saints with breviary lessons written according to the book: she came of a comfortably placed French family with long traditions of piety and priests and nuns in the ancestral role; she was precocious in holiness and at the age of ten was put to direct the retreat of a young woman of twenty. Of the two the ten-year-old found it the greater humiliation. Her new foundation developed unobtrusively out of the sodality organised by her uncle, Canon de Soudan, and at the age of twenty-one she was the first Superior of the first regular community. Yet though the congregation grew steadily and Marie Thérèse duly became Superior .General, by the age of forty she was expelled, never to be Vindicated and to die in disgrace.

In Ravenna, on a spring morning, it is easy to believe that the untroubled achievement of the early Christian mosaics reached a point of fidelity to the Christian mystery which was never to be matched again. The immense volume of medieval carving in the round, the seven centuries of religious painting in the West, the whole story from Duccio to Matisse: it would be fantastic to deny the religious meaning of such a Benedicite of the things of men's hands. But, confronted in Ravenna with the unique evidence (in the West, at least) of a representation of the Christian mystery that has known no later modification, here in the empty basilicas with nothing to interrupt the full impact of those eloquent walls, one is led to a simple acceptance.