On Christmas Eve, in a comprehensive survey of the dangers and opportunities of the future, his Holiness Pius XII reiterated many of the teachings that have been characteristic of his Pontificate. We would point especially to his desire for collaboration among good-willed worshippers of Almighty God. ‘These principles (for the solution of the social question) can be followed in their entirety, and bear their fullest fruits only when statesmen and people, employers and employees, are animated by faith in a personal God . . . Every man who believes in God is numbered among his partisans and paladins. Those who have faith in Christ, in his divinity, in his love, in his work of love and brotherhood amongst men will make a particularly valuable contribution to the reconstruction of the social order.’ At the same time his Holiness reaffirms the spiritual centrality of Rome, concluding with this moving appeal : ‘From this Rome, centre, rock, and teacher of Christianity, from this city called Eternal by reason of its relations with the living Christ rather than by reason of its association with the passing glory of the Caesars, from this Rome . . . We direct Our Appeal to all . . .’ The present number of Blackfriars offers some parallels to these words.

[The following pages were written in response to a request from a group of Anglican Papalists for some account of the ‘official Roman doctrine’ regarding the practical consequences of separation from visible unity with the Catholic Church. They are here offered in the hope of providing a complement to the writer’s article on ‘Membership of the Church’ (Blackfriars, September, 1941).

As membership of the Church is an analogical concept which admits of many manners and degrees, so correspondingly is privation of that membership. In this essay we abstract altogether from such diversities and degrees of privation, and confine ourselves to the consideration of the results of factual loss of external communion with the Catholica. The question is not, therefore, ‘Who is in schism?’, but ‘What is the practical outcome of being in schism?’]

In August and October, 1926, the Anglican Quarterly, Theology, published two remarkable articles written by the Ireland Professor of Exegesis at Oxford (C. H. Turner) and entitled ‘St. Peter in the New Testament.’ Their writer was a scholar of such competence in Biblical and Patristic studies that his advocacy of the Petrine claims made his articles the most important work on Anglo-Roman controversy since Newman’s Development.

One point especially was almost a startling innovation which might have identified an anonymous writer not with England but with Rome. Let the writer make the point in his own words :

Readers of the June number of Blackfriars, 1941, will be familiar with Mr. Addleshaw’s inspiring call for a return to dogma and worship as the source of our social activities and as a basis for reunion. In The High Church Tradition the Vice-Chancellor of St. Chad’s College, Durham, shows his thesis to be established in the best Anglican tradition as well as in the Catholic teaching of the Church from the beginning. We would recommend this book with vigour to Catholic readers not merely to foster a sympathy for the most characteristic and Catholic Anglican viewpoint, but also that they may learn a lesson in the right approach to social action as well as to reunion We would ask Catholics to banish prejudice before opening the book and to be prepared to learn from someone who has arrived at an insight into the relation between revealed Truth and action far from apparent in many Catholic ‘activists.’

The modern practice of prayer, meditation, and study for Unity on the basis of our Lord’s words as they are recorded in the seventeenth chapter of St. John can be traced to the striking letter on the reunion of Christendom which Pope Leo XIII wrote in 1894, on his completion of fifty years of episcopal life. The aged Pontiff, who was to remain active for nearly ten more years, prefaced his appeal to Orthodox and Anglican, pagan and lapsed, with the following commentary :

‘As this Divine prayer embraces not only the souls who then believed in Jesus Christ, but also every one of those who were henceforth to believe in Him, it gives us an excellent reason for confidently expressing our hopes and for making all possible endeavours that men of every race and clime may be called and moved to embrace the unity of Divine faith.’

The liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church is known and appreciated by the Catholic West. Less known are its non-liturgical devotions. One such devotion, ‘the prayer of Jesus,’ has for centuries been encouraged in the Eastern Church, though, leaving the freedom of choice in spiritual ways to her faithful, she never imposed it or ascribed to it any particular merits (a practice unknown to the East). With this proviso the Prayer can be compared with the Rosary in the West; and as its roots go back to the early, undivided Church, it could be claimed by the West no less than by the East.

‘Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.’ This invocation has behind it volumes of spiritual writings and centuries of ascetico-mystical tradition. It is known as ‘the art or mental prayer.’

Many seem to have built their whole spiritual life on the prayer of Jesus, though it cannot be regarded as detached from the rest of the Christian life: Bible reading, sacramental grace, practice of the Commandments and theological virtues. In monasteries it was combined with special ascetical practices. Beginners in the use of the prayer abstained from devotional reading in order to concentrate, and the prayer replaced private psalmody in the cell, outside the services. Some kept it as a unique rule. It was repeated with beads several thousand times and was accompanied by prostrations. This acted as the first ascetical exercise of the will in obedience to the rule imposed by one’s spiritual father, teaching also control over the body.