The Thomist Society of St Nicholas of Caen was begun in May, 1942, because some women students at the university in that town wanted to have a religious education on the same level as their intellectual training. They therefore decided to become disciples of St Thomas Aquinas, seeing that the Church names him as the surest master and guide.

The intention (and indeed the result) of the first lectures was to introduce the students to St Thomas’s thought and principal theses, and to stimulate them to do more than merely consult him, in fact to go right into his monumental Summa Theologica and live in contact with his spirit and teaching.

Seeing for themselves how capable St Thomas was of bringing them to the knowledge of God and giving them the basic principles of their own lives, they opened the Summa and studied it over a period of two years, 1943-45. This work was directed by Père Fauvergue, the Dominican Prior at Le Havre. They took the first eleven questions of the Prima Pars, studying them article by article—God, his existence, his nature—and they were filled with admiration for a teaching so wonderful in itself and so exactly suited to their needs.

Readers of Labour, Life and Poverty by the Polish economist F. Zweig (Gollancz, 1948) will have met a strange aspect of working class lives. They will have met workers earning £5 per week and spending over 30s. of it on their own cigarettes, or men spending 30s. a week on drink. The general picture of the London worker described in this book is of a class saved from pauperism by council houses and social services only to return to pauperism by their spending habits.

But how can it be otherwise? Our desires in these days are determined by so many factors that have one thing in common and that is that we should have more. The heroes on the films are never without a cigarette, never without a drink; they have no need to work, even when their ‘work’ is part of the background of the film. Money never restricts them, their women have beautiful clothes and their apartments are the last word in luxury. Our popular reading material follows the same line and helps to create, a desire for more and more. Our advertisers do the same. New desires are very often created and they have, in fact, become enshrined in American economics as part of an explaining away of depressions.

So we workers want more money and when we get it we want more still so that we can ape these ideals held up to us by those who want our money. The whole idea of an ever increasing standard of life is promoted by those who benefit materially by our constant strivings to possess more and more money.

What I have long wanted to say may have been said before by many people better qualified than I to say it, but it has not been said often enough. There are too many critics and potential pioneers ready to rush into print to condemn existing school systems and propose exciting new ones: there are too few who consider their attitude towards three fundamental questions.

First of these questions is, What are we educating boys for?-— or—Do we aim at turning out boys to live in the world as it is, or as we think it ought to be, or as we hope it will be?

The question is the more important because many parents will think it silly. They provide so little or so impoverished a home-life for their children that the only discipline boys now experience is what they are subjected to at school, and if parents’ ambition is that their children shall be fitted to share in the prevalent laxness of modern life, our present system of education with its irksome rides and obligations offers unsuitable training.

If parents wish their children to change the world they must realise their own obligations: they must cease to baulk the efforts of the schools by permitting indiscipline in their homes; they must co-operate with those upon whom they thrust the burden of bringing up their children, and I fear that few of them would come out well if reports were written on their conduct in this respect during the holidays.

With the death of Bernanos, France lost more than a novelist. His was the authentic voice of a tradition that is older than a nation and which will surely outlast it. It is true that he wrote novels, and they were supreme in their perception of human destiny, incomparable in eloquence and passion. But the form of them was an instrument, not an end, and the professional critic may readily discover an indifference, even a contempt, for the nicely-ordered ingenuities of fiction. Bernanos was a prophet for whom the novel, or indeed prose as such, happened to be a trumpet to which his own generation might be enticed to listen. He believed in God and he believed in God’s hand at work in the affairs of men. For him the only ultimate truth was the plenitude of divine life, and he looked with an unfaltering vision on a world in which that life was usually ignored, sometimes acknowledged, but which in every case was the arena of a conflict that can end only with the Last Judgment of all. The popular success of the Journal d ‘un Curd de Campagne made a central idea of Bernanos’s familiar to readers to whom Sous le Soleil de Satan or Monsieur Ouine might seem intolerable, unreadable, remote. The huge weight that hangs on moral choice became increasingly for Bernanos a truth to be revealed not merely in the high moments of human tragedy but constantly, at every turn of the head, at every neutral gesture.

Symptomatic cures are rarely effective. Satisfactory treatment, medical or political, demands a knowledge of causes, as well as symptoms. So long as the cause is unknown, remedies are futile. Yet the Western Allies are striving to impose just such a symptomatic cure for Nazism, without ever investigating its causes; that, perhaps, is all political action can do. But to dismiss Nazism, in theory and practice, as a policy of anti-Semitism, concentration camps, imperialism, militarism and compulsory sterilisation, is not enough; all those abuses may be eradicated by A.M.G., but they are merely the symptoms, just as unemployment and degradation were merely the occasions, of Hitler’s revolution. The inherent disposition to Nazism will remain until its causes are diagnosed and treated. The writer believes this inherent disposition to come from tendencies engendered or encouraged by Luther, when he denied Natural Morality, and rejected the claims of the Church; without that rebellion, Nazism might never have occurred.

I do not enjoy making such bold assertions;. I should be glad to see them disproved; but there is no virtue in concealing the truth. Let me not be misunderstood, however. No one would make Luther a champion of Dachau and Buchenwald; one might as readily accuse George Washington of defending the atomic bomb; but Luther suffered from having disciples. In fact, only a chemist can detect the affinity between coal and diamonds, but none the less it is there; so with Luther and the disposition to Nazism.

The technical achievements and elaboration since the sixteenth century do not comprise the whole of modern capitalism. Capitalism has been much more than that; it has been an outlook on life with its own peculiar orientation and values. To endeavour to understand capitalism as a socio-economic form, therefore, it will be of help to look at the type of character which played a fundamental rôle in the capitalistic development. There is a vast literature on the relation between capitalism and Calvinism, especially in its Puritan form. The general question does not concern us here. What we shall consider is the Puritan character as it appeared in the middle seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this way it will be possible for us to discern more clearly the temper from which the modern technical innovations sprung or by which they were exploited. The spirit that lies behind these new methods in many ways involves an asceticism as rigid and as austere as the older medieval one: but the goal is different, the ascesis is intramundane, while the reward is no longer invisible but very near and very tangible.

When one examines the Puritan mentality at this period, that character with its intense energies and limited horizon, it reveals those features that have made possible the organisation of industry and wealth which has caught millions of human beings in its meshes during the course of the modern era; meshes more unbreakable than steel because they were spun of the fibre of emotionless hearts and held together by the unyielding rigidity of relentless human wills; meshes cast by men conscious of a purpose to be achieved and self-righteous in the pursuit of that purpose.

In writing about the new Latin translation of the Hebrew Psalter there is a temptation (to which I see some have yielded) to use , some such title as Psallite sapienter; then one can follow up the title with St Augustine’s commentary on these words: ‘David here teaches us to sing the psalms intelligently, to seek rather the heart’s enlightening than the sounds that strike the ear’. But under the circumstances I thought I had better first look up the 46th Psalm in the new translation, and there I found that I should have fallen at the very first fence. The phrase does not appear; it is psallite hymnum instead.

You see how warily we shall have to walk, if the new translation becomes official, both in quoting the psalms and the Fathers’ commentaries on the psalms. Not only that, but we shall have to say farewell to many of our favourite verses: such verses as have, rightly or wrongly, nourished the piety of the faithful ever since Latin became the common language of the Western Church. No longer will the priest be able to pour out his soul at the foot of the altar with the words Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetijicat juventutem meam.. There is no mention of anybody’s youth in that verse, apparently. And, horribile dictu, we may have to begin the canonical hours not with the gloriously resounding Dens in adjutorium meum intende but with the more modest if more correct Placeat tibi Deus ut eripias me.

There is a general impression that the Welsh Nonconformist tradition is hostile to the introduction of religious instruction into education, hostile to denominational schools, and is the ally of secularist principles in education. This article can be no more than a note on the matter, but it may help to give Catholics working in Wales some clue to the understanding of the Nonconformist position.

Most people are aware that the Welsh Nonconformist attitude was developed during the struggle between church and chapel in the 19th century. The ‘church’ was the established Church of England, the Anglican and anglicising church of the land-owning Tory Welsh-despising gentry. The ‘chapel’ was the loose confederation of three or four dissenting bodies to which the mass of the Welsh-speaking peasantry belonged. The Catholic Church hardly came into the picture.

Indirectly, it was in it from the beginning of the struggle. It was in 1843 that the Calvinistic Methodist body confirmed its hitherto reluctant ‘dissent’ by a resolution to join the other Nonconformist bodies in the support of British schools, in which no dogmatic religion was taught, as opposed to the National schools of the Church of England. From that date the battle is engaged. The Calvinistic Methodist resolution was directly due to the progress of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England. The ‘Puseyites’ roused alarm in Wales. They seemed to herald the capture of the Church of England by Rome. Protestantism was in danger. The Catechism in the schools could be used to Romanise. The last link between the Church and the Methodists was broken, and the British school campaign was the answer of Welsh Nonconformity to the Oxford Movement.

The world today is struggling to shift immovable blocs, but there is one fast-forming bloc which, despite its great inherent dangers, seems to have received little notice. The extension of education and the emphasis laid on its purely formal side are tending to introduce a trade union as it were, of ‘men of letters’, whose blessing it will be necessary to obtain before being accepted for any profession or administrative post—I say ‘men of letters’, referring to those symbols of academic prowess which follow their names rather than to any knowledge of the humanities which might, in a more liberal age, have led to their acquiring them. In the academic world at the moment, fortunately, there are still many fine representatives of this more enlightened past, but it is very hard to see how they can find worthy successors under the present system, particularly if education is to be state-controlled. The more obvious characteristics of this system are excessive specialisation and an undue respect for the expert, but more harmful is the attitude that lies behind it. The modern pundits are not misled, as the Victorians were, into an over-optimistic belief in the powers of the human mind and its ability to obtain not only physical luxury by scientific research but also spiritual satisfaction by an idealistic philosophy of its own making; but rather, cynically disillusioned by the failure of their predecessors, they limit the sphere of the human mind, even in the so-called humane faculties, to that accumulation of facts or manipulation of words which can be tested by examinations.

I think that even before this letter Your Piety will have had intelligence of the outrages committed here. When events so terrible have happened, what place in the world can remain in ignorance of the dire calamity? Report of it has been carried to the ends of the earth, and has brought with it everywhere wide sorrow and lamentation. But the time is not one for lamentation only, but for remedy and for counsel—how best to stay the terrible tempest that has fallen upon the Church. I have therefore considered it my duty to urge certain holy and reverend bishops—Demetrius, Pansophius, Pappus and Demetrius—to leave the churches committed to them, brave the great stretch of seas, embark on this distant journey and make all speed to Your Charity; they can then put all before you clearly and help to contrive an early remedy. With them I have sent my honoured friends the deacons Paul and Cyriacus; I myself will briefly relate events as well as the space of a letter allows.

The Emperor had had laid before him some charges against Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria. He summoned him to, appear alone, but the Patriarch brought along with him a great number of Egyptian bishops, meaning, it would seem, to show at the outset that he had come to give pitched battle. Upon reaching Constantinople—this majestic and sacred capital—he flouted custom and long tradition by not entering the cathedral church and not visiting myself; he would neither speak nor pray nor communicate with me.

The morning of April 16th, 1209, witnessed in the square of St George in Assisi (now called the Piazza Santa Chiara) an incident most rare and strange in the history of men. Warned and expectant of good things, a great crowd of beggars and outcasts had assembled, and to them presently came two men bearing between them a deep, heavily-weighted sack filled to the top with money. With that large indiscriminateness that often accompanies Catholic charity they began to hand out right and left the contents of the sack. The method of distribution would have horrified a modern humanitarian. There was no personal interviewing or questioning, no assessment of alms-qualification, no means test. A careless and bountiful profusion characterised this very medieval gesture; and when the last coin had been given away and the last beggar satisfied, it was probably the literal truth that the only completely destitute persons in that crowded square were the two prodigal benefactors.

The sack had contained in money the total worldly possessions of Bernard a Quintavalle, a very rich merchant of Assisi. Some little time before, he had gone one day with Francis to a small nearby church to pray and to seek God’s will in his regard and, opening the book of the Gospels which lay upon the altar, they had immediately come upon the words: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.’