The weeping and wailing of Margery Kempe are so un-English a phenomenon, that it is no wonder if many of her fellow pilgrims reviled her as a hypocrite, a Lollard, and a ‘right wicked woman’. It seems never to have occurred to her that most people went on pilgrimage in a somewhat holiday mood, and that therefore her pious table talk was, for them, entirely out of place, to say nothing of her habit of falling down and crying ‘wonder loud’ for compassion of Jesus. With foreigners she usually fared much better, simply because they did not understand the purport of her cries. They would make sympathetic remarks about hot weather and indigestion.

Both at home and abroad, however, Margery had her consolations. There were always the ‘ghostly men who loved and favoured her’, particularly when she cried. ‘Worshipful clerks, both archbishops and bishops, doctors of divinity and bachelors also’, encouraged her to believe that she was led by the Holy Ghost and by no evil spirit, and the list of these is certainly impressive.

Those of us who are called upon from time to time to teach the faith to children are often perplexed about what we should in fact teach. The Catholic faith, of course; the catechism seems the obvious choice, it is clear and easy to learn. But then what are we to do about the scriptures? It is not always very clear how we can combine the two, they follow their own rhythms.

When I was sent to teach at a Catechism Camp last summer the problem Was very much in my mind—the very name ‘Catechism Camp’ seemed to indicate the method; and yet I had found, the previous year, that catechism teaching is far from satisfactory in itself. The children know the answers on the whole, and the meaning behind the answers tends to confine one to the logical steps of a remote theology.

In 1861 Syon Abbey at last came back from Portugal to England, having been driven into exile, for the second time, in 1558; and this year in their present home, their third since their return, at South Brent in Devon, the abbess and her sisters can look back with especial thankfulness over their long history of trials and wanderings endured for God's glory and the true faith. And in this year of prayers for the cause of the Forty Martyrs, Syon, which gave one of her sons, the ‘Angel', Blessed Richard Reynolds, to witness with his blood to her constancy, should be in the minds of all Catholics in England as they thank God for his mercies shown to them.

It is not surprising that an English house of St Bridget's order should have been founded soon after its approval and her canonization in 13 91, for England had been long renowned for the great devotion in which the Blessed Virgin was here held, and the Bridgettines were and still are very specially dedicated to her.

Graham Greene's last two works of prose fiction are very encouraging. No one can deny Greene's competence in the early work, nor his Tightness in choosing characteristic themes of the times (violence, cauchemar, sex and sin) and treating them in suitable modes (the employment of cinematographic devices, newspaper techniques and popular psychology), but the high estimate of Greene, particularly on the continent (he shares it with Somerset Maugham, it appears), has always raised doubts among his serious English readers. There is the central problem of his obvious commitment to Roman Catholicism which affects the reader; and, it is fair to say, irritates both Catholic and non-Catholic reader. Writing as a Catholic, I should say that the main burden of complaint is the meretricious nature of this involvement. We can admit that Greene can and does present the conditions of salvation and damnation with vivid effectiveness; Pinkie, wandering through the back-streets of Brighton in the early morning, presents us with the sensation and the dilemma:

We begin the new liturgical year looking forward to the coming of one whose name is hidden from us, but gradually revealed in the course of Advent. This name ‘comes from afar', it comes indeed from the heart of God, from the mind of the Father, because it is the name of his Word, his only-begotten and well-beloved Son. But as yet it is to us a deep mystery. We are gazing at this profound mystery from a great distance, and because of the immense abyss which separates us from God, our sight is blurred. In our state of fallen human nature, our gaze is darkened because of original sin and our own personal sins and therefore we need the brightness, the shining clarity of this name to fill the whole earth. It must fill our minds because the truth of God is for us so obscure.

It has been concluded, on the evidence of the verses that Suger wrote to celebrate his new basilica, that he looked upon it mainly as a monument to his own greatness. But although one admits that he was not without his streak of vanity, this particular manifestation of what at first glance appears to be mere complacency is worth examining more closely. His verses are not simply tombstone bombast; on the contrary, each one has a definite message to convey. It becomes clear that they were written for a purpose more interesting than that of Suger's selfaggrandizement. They were meant, in fact, to provide a commentary on the whole conception and undertaking of the new St Denis, his opus nobile, as he calls it.

It is, of course, not easy for us to imagine why Gothic architecture and traditional Christian iconography should require any explanation. It requires a real effort to imagine St Denis making the sort of impact on Suger's contemporaries that Ronchamp makes on ours.

Professor David Knowles, when still a young Downside monk, published in 1927 a short survey, The English Mystics,which workers in this field have used and quoted and respected as one of the first appraisals to be both popular and scholarly, free alike from prejudice and enthusiasm, of the reputations of some spiritual writers of later mediaeval England. In that same year, Hope Allen produced her vast study, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and since then much else has been accomplished. She assisted in the sensational discovery and the publication of the Book of Margery Kempe; and although most of us have come to deplore her methods, her ebullience and many of her contentions, we who have followed her have all learned and profited much from Hope Allen's tireless devotion to her subject. Professor Arnould's text of Rolle's Melos, Professor Hodgson's critical editions of The Cloud of Unknowing and the allied treatises, Dr Helen Gardner's studies in the text of the Cloud and The Scale of Perfection, and the edition of The Chastising of God's Children in which Miss Joyce Bazire and the present writer collaborated, are all works which could not have begun where they did, had it not been for the pioneering of Miss Allen.

Psychologists, especially Jungians, have drawn our attention to the fact that in the myths and legends of the ancient world, and in the rites and ceremonies of primitive peoples, there is a recurrent pattern, varying in the arrangement of the pieces, but always conveying the same idea. There is a hero who challenges darkness, dragons, or deep waters, is slain, and rises, communicating new life to all his fellows. The hero-victim is more strong and glorious after his conquest, the light shines more brightly after its conflict with darkness, and the waters that close over the victim's head become the womb from which he is re-born, a man more complete and perfect than he was before.

The pattern is deeper down in the universe than the myths that express it. The earth itself subsists by a process of decay and renewal, of species striving after perfection, and the vegetable world repeats almost monotonously its theme of seed-time and harvest, fall, and winter sleep. Probably the scientist sees a repetition of the same design in the miniature worlds his microscope reveals.

Let us proceed, in a very humdrum way, from the general to the particular. A word first, then about what virtue is. It is a perfection of our nature. It means, literally, strength. The Latin word virtus comes from vir, a man, and the basic idea is one of manliness or manhood, if the ladies will pardon so masculine an attitude; but manliness not so much distinguished from womanliness as from childishness. Virtue is the proper characteristic of the adult. The virtues are firmly rooted dispositions or habits or attitudes by which our faculties are given a bias towards the performance of good actions instead of bad actions—the faculties we are concerned with in the moral life being the will and the sense appetites, not the mind, except for the key virtue of prudence, of which more anon. Left to themselves the other faculties lack direction, and just dissipate their energies aimlessly.

‘People buy the Bible in such quantities as to make it a best-seller. But they do not read it very much and they understand it less’. So says Fr N. J. McEleney, c.s.p., general editor of the Pamphlet Bible Series, which is being published by the Paulist Press, New York, at 75 cents a number. The series is the most effective thing that has yet appeared to help ordinary people of general education to read the Bible and understand what they read. A short notice of the first four pamphlets appeared in Life of the Spirit in May 1960. Up to the present (January 1961) twelve pamphlets have appeared, bringing the series up to the book of Judges. No. 1 is an introduction to the Pentateuch; then follow two each for Genesis and Exodus, one for Leviticus, two each for Numbers and Deuteronomy, one each for Josue and Judges.

They help the ordinary reader first of all by their covers, which are bright, light, and modern. “Whether their general décor meets with your artistic approval or not, there is no doubt that it catches your eye and arouses interest.

And how should Aeneas Sylvius not be the first to beckon’ When on die opening page of that bulky folio (Bale 1551) there is a formula so close to us: that one should be grown up at twenty, prudent at thirty, rich at forty? Measure that formula against Dante, or even Petrarch (whom it might fit, yet who could not have uttered it), and you will see why Aeneas Sylvius claims kinship forward, more than back. The quality of his mind was also therefore sceptical, as witness that little anecdote on Scotland. ‘I had heard once there was a tree in Scotland which growing on the river bank produced fruits in the shape of duckings; and these when they reach maturity fall of their own accord, some on the land, some in the water; and those that fall on the ground rot, but those falling in the water soon come to life and straight away fly up into the air with wings and feathers.

Like many other members of the Catholic gentry in penal times, Margaret Ward had to earn a livelihood in domestic service. She was born in Cheshire at Congleton and went to live in London with another gentlewoman named Mrs Whitall, probably in the capacity of companion or housekeeper.

The Catholics of the district around Bridewell, where she lived, were much agitated by the plight of a secular priest named Richard Watson who was imprisoned in the gaol there. Margaret would hear his story, how during his first imprisonment he had been so weakened by starvation, vermin and close confinement in the fetid atmosphere of the place, that he had renounced his faith and attended a Protestant service.

Afterwards, his conscience becoming a greater misery than all he had endured in the gaol, nothing would satisfy him but to go to confession and be reconciled.

These words, used by more than one contemporary of Blessed Richard Reynolds, suggest at once light, purity, strength; a gaze turned ever to truth, that ‘otherness’ which we associate with the life of the angels and which makes them so ready to give help to sinful mortals.

For what will be said about one of our proto-martyrs in this short account, I have had to rely on the research of the late Dom Adam Hamilton, O.S.B., of Buckfast Abbey in his book, now out of print, called The Angel of Syon (published by Sands & Co.), and on a shorter work by Dom Ernest Graf, published in 1934 for the fourth centenary of the martyrdom.

The birthplace, family and exact date of birth of our subject still evade us, but it seems to be more or less accepted that he was born at Pinhoe, near Exeter, in 1488 or 1489.

The Canticle of Canticles of our Douay version very literally represents a Hebrew superlative. We could translate it ‘the most lovely song’ or the ‘fairest of songs'. Over the centuries innumerable books have been written about this great poem. There has been, and there still is, much disagreement about its interpretation; there is no disagreement about its consummate beauty. But there is far more than beauty, for the book is part of scripture and as such is inspired or has a divine character. The more central Hebrew tradition was firm about this. Rabbi Akibah, about A.D. 130, wrote: ‘No one in Israel has ever questioned the Canticle's divine character; indeed the whole world is not worth the day on which the Canticle of Canticles was bestowed upon Israel. All the books of scripture are holy, but the Canticles most holy.’ (Yadaim 3, 5.) The Church teaches that Canticles is part of scripture, and that teaching can be traced to the list of scripture compiled by St Cyril of Jerusalem, when Canticles is explicitly mentioned.

I Write this article as a very ordinary Catholic layman. A schoolmaster whose work very definitely does not finish at four o'clock, father of four children not yet in their teens, an active member of various professional and Catholic organizations, the only handyman, painter and decorator about the house, I am pretty busy. But I feel very strongly that once family and professional obligations have been fulfilled, the performance of works of Christian charity is my most important duty.

It was as an undergraduate at Oxford after the war that I was persuaded by Catholic friends to join in works of charity. Like many others, we made a special effort to heal some of the wounds of war. We tried to become the genuine friends and tactful helpers of Polish students and German prisoners of war. We collected and despatched food and clothing to refugees and to Germany. Then a Dominican introduced us to the normal charitable work which can—and should—be performed in the ordinary Catholic parish.

A lay organization whose major work is the giving of closed retreats is exceptional enough to be interesting. Such is the Banyakaroli movement to be found in parts of Tanganyika. This organization has changed somewhat during its existence but only in the sense that as a need was found the movement adapted itself to meet it.

The story began in 1941 when a Father Heise was at Kashozi, Tanganyika. This priest examined the local Catholic Action organization critically and decided that it had no influence in the parish, that its members were all getting on in years, their zeal had diminished and they were unable to adapt themselves to the problems of the younger generation. Considering that a complete renewal was necessary Father Heise selected three young married men to be the core of a new movement and sent them out to the villages to gain recruits. The nucleus were trained through a monthly day of recollection, observed in complete silence and followed by an instruction.

Too many children present problems fraught with danger these days. One has only to pick up the newspapers or listen to the news to appreciate the seriousness and. scope of the child-adult conflict as well as its far-reaching consequences. Indeed, it is not uncommon to read of parents and teachers being beaten, injured or killed. Conflicts and tensions between adults and children are becoming too much the rule rather than the exception.

All kinds of explanations have been offered for the misbehaviour and misdeeds. Some say the attitude on the part of children is caused by the influence of comic books. Others claim it is lack of adult discipline at home and school. Some lay the blame to a decline of ethical and moral values as religion loses its grasp on people and has lost its significance to the modern mind. Still others say the reason is due to lack of respect for authority which stems from home and school situations.

Born at Trawsfynydd, a remote lake-side village in North Wales, in the year 1577, John Roberts was, in the words of T. P. Ellis, ‘heir of a thousand years of “Welsh history and Welsh Catholicism'. The awareness of historical continuity displayed by the martyr at his death sprang, no doubt, from the impressions made upon the child John, not only by the stories he must have heard of the kings and princes of whom he was a direct descendant, of the saints who had sprung from the same line as himself, but also from the history implicit in the country-side around him, from the nearby and ruined abbey, and from the desecrated altars of the parish church. Thehistory of Trawsfynydd, a village bearing one of the Welsh names for the cross, embodies in itself the whole history of Wales.