Near the Arch of Titus and overlooking the Forum is the Church of St Francesca Romana, or as it is more frequently called, the Basilica di Sta Maria Nuova. In the confession is a statue of a woman with an attendant angel, and in the crypt, in a glass case, are the remains of that woman dressed w a. religious habit. Every hundred years the casket is taken to an obscure convent under the Capitol Hill in the Tor di Specchi, which is the house of the order of Oblates founded in 1433. Here the sisters remove the old habit, rotten with age, and dress the skeleton of their revered and beloved founder in a new habit, and the body is then returned to its tomb in the church.

Frances was born in one of the palaces on the outskirts of Rome, in the square now named Piazza Navona and not far from the church of St Agnes, in 1384. Her parents were of noble birth and the child was brought up in a pious and prosperous household in the midst of considerable luxury. At a very early age she announced her wish to enter a convent, but her parents insisted that she should marry, in 1396 and at the age of twelve, a rich nobleman, Lorenzo Ponziani.

The Church preaches our Lord through the liturgy, through the works of charity, and through the word. The vocation of deacon involves of its nature the function of preaching God's word (e.g. Stephen and Philip), and giving catechetical instruction to children and adults. To this end the deacon would need not a complete theological training, but a sound grasp of religious knowledge. The parish would not expect him to expatiate on theological problems and principles, but they would require a simple presentation of the faith and the commandments. For this purpose they might expect that by reason of the deacon's personal contact with particular spheres of life, he could be on terms of easy familiarity with them. The deacon could also perform baptisms with the full ceremonies, and burials. If the Church were willing to legislate for it, people coming to be married could confer the sacrament on each other before him.

It is 1936—or could be ‘39, or ‘29, or any of the pre-war years. The Catholic Evidence Guild speaker, in the market square, is surrounded by a motley crowd; some noisy, and angrily putting their point of view; others genuinely interested, ftod asking a carefully-thought-out question; some frankly bored, but hoping for blood to enliven the proceedings.

How many of us were familiar with the scene—and few of us realized the full significance of what we saw.

A speaker? Yes, we saw the speaker—heard him too—and were impressed with his lively answer, and obvious desire to impart his own love for his faith, to those who would listen to him. We rather wished that we had his courage, or his gifts, or both. But we didn't see the point of his speaking in the market square; it wasn't quite respectable, not the sort of thing that a real Catholic would drag his faith to.

The first five verses of this psalm, from ‘My heart has uttered a good word’ to ‘Your right hand will conduct you wonderfully', Augustine has interpreted as being addressed to Christ, partly by God the Father, who utters a good word when he eternally begets the Son, and partly by the psalmist speaking prophetically. Then he continues in the same vein:

Your arrows are sharp, very potent.’ It means his words, piercing the heart, arousing love. As the bride says in the Canticle, ‘I have been wounded by charity’ (Cant, ii, 5). She means that she is in love, that she is on fire, that she is sighing for the bridegroom whose words have pierced her like arrows. ‘Your arrows are sharp, very potent', both piercing and effective. ‘Peoples will fall beneath you.’ They have been struck and have fallen.

After the apostles themselves, as we see them in their writings and in the Acts, who is there better than the Father of the Preachers to show us the laws of apostolic life? St Dominic in fact exhibits very strikingly certain realities which are most essential in such a life. They form what one might call the Law of the Five Beats. The more one meditates on it, the more one comes to think that it deserves to be classical.

Today the first ‘beat’ in order of time does not seem, for most apostles, to be contemplative withdrawal into God. They are in the world, they have experience of it, and grace presses them to proclaim the gospel to it. They begin with what was for St Dominic the second and the fourth ‘beats': they can already taste the experience of combat for the faith.

Historic examples of steadfast faith are collected and put in writing, because they bear witness to the power of God's grace, and help to inspire men; when read they come before us again, as it were, so that God shall be honoured and men given strength. Surely similar accounts from our own times ought to be circulated, as being just as useful for both these purposes? At some future date these contemporary examples will themselves be respectably historic, and thus of use to coming generations; even though at present they carry less weight, because what is past is considered more hallowed than what is new.

I Suppose the thing that strikes one most forcibly about St Augustine's Confessions is the astonishing power of introspection which they reveal. Rarely can there have been a man aware of himself and his experience with such ruthless clarity. The result is that all Augustine's theological thought is an experience-theology. it is never abstract, uncommitted, or impersonal. But this is not to say that his mind remained enclosed in his own personal world. He was not only a person of unusual self-awareness, he was also, if we can so put it, an unusually public person, Because he could look at himself so shrewdly and objectively, he was able to develop his experience into ideas of universal validity. It is with such a development of his experience of conversion that we are here concerned; not with the personal voyage of discovery described in the Confessions’, but with the geographical charts which came of that voyage, and which he unfolds in his De Tnnitate.

Much of our knowledge about Katharine springs from legend, but legends are nearly always based on truths, and if the facts available are doubtful and few, the stories about her tell something of her virtues, of her character, and of the reasons for her death. St Katharine is not mentioned by contemporary writers, and different narrators are not even in agreement as to whether Maxentius or Maximinus was the tyrant who put her to death. She was not a popular saint until the eighth century in the east. Her story is contained in the so-called Menologium Basilianum, a collection of legends compiled for the use of the emperor Basil I who died in 886, and this story has been altered considerably since then.

ST HYACINTH MARISCOTTI could be called the patron of back-sliders or the saint of the second chance. A study of her life would do much to ‘confirm the weak knees’ of all those of us who are so prone to say, ‘Sanctity is not for me'. Born at Vignarello in the papal states, of a noble and wealthy family, in the early seventeenth century, young Clarice Mariscotti was sent to Viterbo to be educated in the Franciscan convent. She was not remarkable for her piety and probably suffered from having a sister who was a nun in the same convent. Doubtless the sister also suffered, and one can readily imagine that the friction between the reproachful piety of the one and the misdemeanours of the other may have had unfortunate repercussions on a difficult temperament, giving rise to Clarice's later behaviour.

You would hardly expect to find any remains of the effigies of the Dominican saints in England today, after the great clearance made at the time of the Reformation, From 1221, the year St Dominic died, until the end of Mary's reign in 1558, or for three hundred years, there had been a continuous Dominican life throughout the kingdom.

It is amazing how quickly it spread and took root in most of the principal towns of England and Wales. In no other country were so many priories founded in so short a space of time. At the suppression, there were over a hundred, with an estimated number of nearly two thousand friars.

The eastern counties seem to have been the stronghold, and it is here that relics—strange as it may seem—have survived to the present day, in stone, alabaster, wood and glass.

Serlo was Abbot of Savigny in Normandy from 1139 to 1153 when he retired to Clairvaux; he died in 1158. He was a contemporary and admirer of StBernard; and it was no doubt largely owing to St Bernard's influence that in 1147 Serb submitted the whole group of Savigniac houses to the Cistercian Order. Among these were several in England, including Buckfast and Quarr. Serb had a reputation as a preacher. Of his thirty-four sermons known to survive—not all of them, however, are complete—the greater part were included in the sixth volume of the Bibliotheca patrum Cisterciensium, edited by Tissier in 1664. The rest remain apparently still in manuscript. An exception is that translated here, which was published by Dom Wilmart in the Revue Mabillon, tome XII (1922), pp. 26-3 8. The following is a rather free rendering of the Latin. A third section on prayer seems to be wanting. Perhaps time ran out and it was never delivered.

This article is concerned with the spiritual life of a mission, and. not with the spiritual life of a missionary. That is a different matter. A man may be a saint but yet unsuited to missionary work, as a good concert singer may be unsuited to opera. If the missionary can be both saint and missionary, well and good, but the essential thing is that he be a good missionary, understanding the technique of the work.

What is the root purpose of missionary work? The answer is simple: it is not merely to convert a number of people, to build a school, to teach the children to sing hymns—and wear European clothes?—but to plant the Church. The spiritual life of a mission means the spiritual life of the mystical body, lived by the people there. It means the Church as she is in herself, as the popes have written about her in encyclicals, as the great ages of the Church have known her, and as history has revealed her.