Yves M.-J. Congar (1904-1995) was the foremost French theologian of the twentieth century. The severe trials to which he was subjected by Roman Catholic Church authorities, notwithstanding, Congar loved the Church. As he explained to Jean Puyo in 1975: I am of the Church. I love the Church.’ This love is based on a simple yet profound truth that he recognised the Church as the Mother, the hearth and the homeland of his spiritual being. Congar’s love for the Church, motivated by his love for Christ, is situated in the wider setting of his love for humankind. It is difficult to avoid an admiration for his shrewd insistence on the need to locate the maternal and fraternal dimensions of the Church’s nature, seen as perfectly compatible, in a communion ecclesiology. A communitarian, ecclesial milieu is correctly identified as essential for the formation of Christians:

The Earl of Shaftesbury and the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850 is an interesting example of how a man of sense and humanity can be driven by prejudice into taking a posture that contradicts everything he has striven for. What he did was of less importance than why he did it, for even at the time intelligent men were aware that Shaftesbury was obsessively involved in a storm in a tea-cup.

The term ‘Papal Aggression’ indicates how Shaftesbury’s contemporaries saw the Papal Bull of 1850; this Bull abolished the administration of Roman Catholics in Great Britain by Vicars Apostolic, and appointed instead two Archbishops and twelve Bishops with territorial districts clearly marked out. Shaftesbury was in Scotland recovering from illness when he heard about this. It was, he considered, ‘an act of great annoyance and audacity’ but not contrary to law, and he was prepared to simmer awhile.

When Dr Wiseman was appointed the first Archbishop of Westminster and raised to the dignity of a Cardinal, then Shaftesbury felt that he had no other course but to act, and the publication of the pastoral ‘From out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome’ was interpreted by him as a direct threat towards the Church of England. ‘Catholic England’, wrote the Cardinal, ‘has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished’.

Whatever he did was quickly done, but neither hastily nor in a hurry. This is particularly true of his reading and writing, both of which in sum mounted up imperceptibly to a great deal. His published books and pamphlets, of which even his most intimate companions rarely knew anything until they suddenly appeared ready for printing, are but a small part of the writing he left behind him. This consists of official documents, letters and postcards, plans of sermons and lectures, quotations from books read, and the student’s notes to which he was forever adding something. Considering the busy life he led and the little leisure he was allowed, the extent of his reading and his accurate memory of what he read are very remarkable. Much of it was done in trains and on long voyages. At one time he devoted the time spent in the noisy Underground trains in London to the study of Russian, and made some progress with it. He read history seriously all through life. He returned constantly to his early theological and ecclesiastical studies, refreshing them and keeping them up to date by reading new work as it appeared, preferably such as had a practical bearing on his own special duties. For the nourishment of his own soul and those others whom he had helped in their spiritual life he persevered with his study of the mystics.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century Ernest Renan wrote: ‘I have studied Germany and believed I entered a temple. All I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful and moving. O my soul, it is a treasure indeed, it is the continuation of Jesus Christ. Their morality fills me with admiration, how sweet and how strong they are! I believe that Christ will come to us from there.’

What he meant by ‘Christ’ was: ‘A pure cult, a religion without priests and without exterior practices, resting entirely on the heart's feelings, on the imitation of God, on the Immediate relation of our conscience with the Heavenly Father . . . Jesus founded religion in humanity as Socrates philosophy . . . Jesus founded absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing except the sentiment.’ That is one of the strong currents which Germany sent into the maelstrom of modern European civilisation. Kant, Hegel, Strauss, ‘Baur, Goethe were the sources.”

In 1936 Abbot Ildefons Herwegen spent four weeks in Italy. In an audience the late Pope said that he had himself been able to establish that liturgical life in Germany was on the increase, and that this was a strong support for Holy Church in these days of strife and suffering. And this is another current of which Maria-Laach is the source.

Europe is one. Its unity is not an opposition of races and nations overcome by commercial, diplomatic or cultural contacts.

The Eddington Memorial Lectures were founded to foster interest in the relationship of the natural sciences to religion or ethics, with the hope of finding some common basis between different methods of seeking truth. In particular, as Professor Polanyi says at the beginning of this year’s lecture, the founders were preoccupied with the tardiness of moral improvement as compared with the swift advances of science; this aspect, neglected by his predecessors, he proposes to examine. But in the first place he doubts the assumptions which lie behind the ‘problem’, for, he writes:

Never in the history of mankind has the hunger for brotherhood and righteousness exercised so much power over the minds of men as today. The past two centuries have not been an age of moral weakness; but have, on the contrary, seen an outbreak of moral fervour which has achieved numberless humanitarian reforms and improved modern society beyond the boldest thought of earlier centuries.

He is not, in fact, here saying that moral improvement does or does not lag behind the advances of science, but that the problem with which we should concern ourselves is something quite different.

With the subject to be discussed, and the first stage in Polanyi’s answer laid before us, we can already see some of the difficulties which lurk within the lecture, although others, scarcely less important, will arise as the arguments develop. Leaving aside for the moment Polanyi’s criticism of the problem, we may doubt its validity for more fundamental reasons.

This article seeks to reappraise the scholarly work of Bede Jarrett OP by drawing out his debt to Sir Ernest Barker. A shared interest in medieval political and social institutions, and in the constitution of the Dominican Order as a model of voluntary association, infused Jarrett's thinking with the tenets of English political pluralism and enabled him to produce a body of work that paid as much attention to concrete political form as to social ethics. As such his work establishes links with nineteenth and early twentieth-century Christian Socialism, as well as echoing certain current preoccupations within political theology.

Had Fr John Gerard been a highwayman instead of a Jesuit his name would doubtless be familiar to every schoolboy, for his exploits are far more exciting than those of Dick Turpin or Robin Hood, and have the additional recommendation of being authentic. It is strange that such a thrilling autobiography should have been allowed to remain out of print for half a century, and Fr Caraman is to be congratulated not only on making good this deficiency, but on producing an edition that may be read as easily as a novel. The former editions edited by Fr John Morris, s.j., had obvious shortcomings. The homely Latin had been turned into solemn, Victorian prose with a mock-Elizabethan tang about it quite unsuited to the original. The text was so interlarded with notes that one could never be sure whether one was reading Gerard, or his editor, or some spy’s report. Fr Caraman has extricated the text from these encumbrances, and put the notes at the end of the book. He has translated Gerard’s brisk and unstudied Latin into exactly the sort of colloquial English that it demands. He has brought Gerard to life in a remarkable way: at last we can fully appreciate his simple piety, his sense of humour, his love of field sports, and his amazing courage. Those who do not know Fr Gerard should read his narrative straight through as they would a novel, and then turn to the notes, and see how almost every incident may be checked and amplified by reference to State Papers and other sources.

Mr George Scott’s Time and Place is a semi-autobiographical analysis of the influences which he believes have contributed towards the formation of a new kind of hero in everyday life—echoes of whom are to be found in fiction—and also of the state of contemporary society in Britain. He posits an imaginary, composite hero—alluding to Mr Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim as an indicator—whose passions are ended before he starts on his journey; who distrusts his own intellectual pretensions and emotions even more than those of others; one who is ‘fearful above all of not being “wide” enough to forestall delusion’ and who ‘is forced back into the defence of laughter, at himself and at the world’. And if he finds within himself ‘any weakling inclination towards constructive ideas for the world, for “crusades” or any phoney nonsense of that kind, then he must secrete them in some dark cellar lest the neighbours discover them and subject him to ridicule.... He brings with him the supposed coarseness of the hobnailed navvy and the Teddy Boy’s fear of being thought soft.’

This is a convenient and, probably, to some extent, true analysis of certain kinds of people with whom most of us are familiar. Whether or not they are to be regarded as heroes in reality the next fifty or hundred years may demonstrate; and whether or not they are likely to be interesting as fictional heroes it is also a little early to forecast. So far it would seem otherwise.

From the Editions du Cerf, 229 Boulevard Latour-Maubourg, Paris—7e, we have received copies of new periodicals issued by that publishing-house, already so well-known for La Vie Intellectuelle and La. Vie Spirituelle. They include Fêtes et Saisons, Cahiers de l’Art Sacré, and La Maison Dieu, the quarterly organ of the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique (250 francs for a year’s subscription). From the same source come two new series of books, Lex Grandi and La. Clarté-Dieu. A detailed survey of these encouraging signs from France will appear in an early number of The Life of The Spirit.

In one region of our lives, we have no problem in understanding how a thing can change its substance while apparently remaining itself. The process is known as metaphor. ‘Fire’ can mean anger or amorousness rather than literal flame, but the word ‘fire’ remains unaltered in this exchange, rather as the bread and wine of the eucharist still look and behave like bread and wine. Since the meaning of a word is its being, we can say that the being or ‘substance’ of the word has changed with this metaphorical transaction. Flame has transubstantiated into fury.

Moreover, ‘fire’ can act as a metaphor of passion only because there are real resemblances between the two. The relation between the two signs is not iconic (they don’t look much like each other), but it is not arbitrary either. Maybe Seamus Heaney could get ‘carburetter’ to mean erotic passion, but for most of us ‘fire’ is a less laborious way of doing it. In a similar way, the bread and wine of the eucharist, as signs of our human solidarity which need to be destroyed (consumed) if they are to yield life, have natural affinities with the body of Christ. As Herbert McCabe once remarked, you couldn’t consecrate Coke and burgers because they aren’t food and drink.

The notion of metaphor will only get us so far in understanding the eucharist, since a change of being which leaves a thing apparently intact is more mysterious than a change of meaning which does so. But a semiotics of the eucharist can be pressed further.

Early in May this year the proctors of Cambridge University took action against The Granta in view of complaints that a poem published in that magazine was blasphemous. The affair made a stir in Cambridge and even got into the London papers j and if I take it here chiefly as an occasion for some remarks on the blasphemies of certain long-dead poets, this is not because I consider the Granta poem negligible. It was not. The remarks that follow are merely one observer’s modest attempt to get the whole subject into focus.

One may start with St Thomas’s preliminary definition of blasphemy: ‘the term seems to denote the disparagement of some high degree of goodness, and especially of the divine goodness’. In the context certain things are presupposed 5 in particular that there is such a thing as goodness, that it has degrees, and that there is a maximum goodness called God. ‘Blasphemy’ is related chiefly to God, as it always has been since the New Testament writers stressed the religious reference of blasphemia (in general, scurrilous or abusive language), though this reference was not lacking in classical Greek, just as the wider or secular sense of the term still appears in the New Testament itself. Both Francis Bacon and St Thomas’s master St Albert speak of ‘blasphemy’ against learning or knowledge; others have spoken of blasphemy against nature, friendship, and so on. But these are extensions of a term already appropriated by Christianity to mean disparaging speech about God, or about things and persons closely associated with him.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some Americans have claimed that U.S. governments have superseded their jurisdiction and violated individuals’ human rights in the use of government mandates. Many citizens and politicians have also claimed that governments are utilizing the pandemic as a smoke screen to take individual rights away from citizens to gain further power. In light of such claims, I provide a Thomistic response to argue that state and local political authorities’ use of public health mandates were other-regarding in seeking to protect the common good in an unprecedented health crisis. Further, I argue that the characterization of individual rights atomized from community has led to an improper understanding of political authorities, individual rights, and our duties to our communities. Rejecting the reductive, skeptical, individualistic, and atomistic views that many Americans have engendered, I provide a Thomistic political orientation that more adequately helps us think about political authorities’ and citizens’ responsibilities within our political communities.

Sir,—My attention has been drawn to an article on ‘‘The Elements of Social Justice” in the November number of Blackfriars, in which the statement is made that “starting with a sub-committee of the Catholic Social Guild, a programme of Housing plans was circulated among various Utility Societies, with the result that a National Council is to be formed under the presidency of the Chairman of the original C.S.G. Committee.”

This statement is incorrect. A sub-committee of the C.S.G. —the C.S.G. Housing Enquiry—was formed some time ago. It sent out a Housing questionnaire which was not sufficiently supported to be of practical use, and the Committee languished. The Chairman, Lady Sanderson, then called a Women’s Conference of societies interested in Housing, to urge the necessity of a Women’s sub-committe to the Central Advisory Committee under the new Housing Act. This idea was widely accepted; delegates from Public Utility Societies, the National Council of Women, the Federation of Women’s Institutes, the Women's Committee of the Royal Institute of British Architecture, Women Housing Estate Managers, Women Pubilc Health Officers and many others have attended the Conferences and given cogent reasons for their co-operation. As a result of the Conferences it is hoped that the Minister of Health may consent to receive a deputation.

It may fairly be claimed on behalf of the C.S.G. that the inception of the Women’s Housing Conference is due to the initiative of the Chairman of its Housing Enquiry, and that she and the other officers of that enquiry have acted as Chairman, Vice-Chairman and Hon. Secretary of the Women’s Housing Conference.